Stages in L1 Acquisition – Summary
- Pre-talking Stage / Cooing (0-6 months) vowel-like sound responding to human sounds more definitely, turns head, eyes seem to search for speaker occasionally some chuckling sounds.
- Babbling Stage (6-8 months) Babbling is the sounds that infants produce as consonant-vowel combinations, Steinberg (2003). The sounds which are produced by infants but not all the speech sounds are same in languages of the world such as [ma-ma-ma] or [da-da-da] and [ba-ba-ba] or [na-na-na].
- Holophrastic Stage (9-18 months) Fromkin (1983) defined holophrastic from holo u201ccompleteu201d or u201cundividedu201d plus phrase u201cphraseu201d or u201csentenceu201d. So holophrastic is the childrenu2019s first single word which represents a sentence.
- The Two-Word Stage (18-24 months) Two-word stage is the mini sentences with simple semantic relations. As Fromkin (1983) states that children begin to form actual two-word sentences, with the relations between the two words showing definite syntactic and semantic relations.
- Telegraphic Stage (24-30 months) When the child begins to produce utterances that are longer than two words, these utterances appear to be u201csentence-likeu201d; they have hierarchical, constituent structures similar to the syntactic structures found in the sentences produced by adult grammar.
- Later Multiword Stage (30+months) at this stage is the fastest increase in vocabulary with many new additions every day; no babbling at all; utterances have communicative intent.
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