Compare And Contrast The Stages Of Child Language Development

Overall, every stage of child language development has its own features and milestones which make it important, however, to me, toddlerhood appears to be the most significant since both nonlinguistic and linguistic developments rapidly begin to occur resulting in the exponential learning of language. Children during this stage have begun to walk increasing the size of their world and the things which they can experience, as well as massively increasing their gestural ability. Also during this stage, children exhibit solitary, imaginative play indicating they have the capacity for complex thoughts, a foundation for abstract nouns, verbs, and linguistic features such as morphology. Finally, locutionary word verbs begin to replace previous illocutionary gestures, for example children begin to say “water” or “give me” rather than gesturing for

For example, children begin to see new objects or actions such as slides and sandboxes, and must learn what it is called through joint reference with their caregiver, showing they have the cognitive ability to learn and associate words for new and irregular information. Their ability for joint reference also stems from their increased fine motor abilities (such as their fingers and hands) as they can more accurately divert the attention and ask their caregiver about unfamiliar objects themselves. Further, the child will be exposed to even more words with at times lower phonotactic probabilities, exposing the child to new sound combinations and further expanding their repertoire of locutionary words. Overall, this increase in movement sets the stage for locutionary language development, as now the child has most of the cognitive skills required in order to expand upon the primitive communication they have