Level 5- Lecture 4

1. Phonological Acquisition

2. What is Phonological Acquisition ?
Phonology: the sounds of a language, how they are
organized to form words
The child's learning how to pronounce the words of
the native language

3. What Does the Child Need to Learn ?
Speech sounds (consonants vowels) 'fish'; 'butter';
'elephant
How speech sounds combine to form words
(phonotactics), 'splash'; 'psash'; 'esplash
Vocabulary

4. Summary
Phonological acquisition has two parts :
Learning to articulate consonants, vowels,
syllables, words
Learning to represent words

5. Stages of Acquisition

6. Babbling : birth to one-year

7. First Words
Age 1;0: first words appear
Age 1;0 to 1;6: child slowly acquires 50 words or so
Age 1;6: first word combinations
Some Characteristics of the Child's First Words
mama Words have simple syllables, e.g
Sounds are limited: m, n, b, d, w, y, f, s

8. Summary
Children acquire phonology over several years
First year: babbling
Second year: first words
Subsequent years: learn to pronounce an
extensive vocabulary
Sounds and syllables increase in number and
complexity Phonological processes capture
error patterns

10. By Bshayer ..

11. Phonetics deals with the physical
aspects and characteristics of all
human sounds whereas phonology is
restricted to the functional aspects of
sounds in a particular language

12. it is the process whereby children
acquire the target language‟s
phonology, including its functional
aspects like the language‟s specific
sound contrasts

13. However, in the whole acquisition
process not only a set of phonological
rules is chronologically acquired but
also a set of morphological, syntactical
and semantic rules

14. Furthermore, these processes are
largely independent of intelligence
although the degree of competence
acquired may vary among
individuals

15. children continue to commit “errors” in their speech.
However, these can be to a certain degree
predictable and follow logic structures. Therefore,
they can be described by typical phonological
processes

16. The first studies of child language
took the form of parental diaries.
The goal of these works was mostly
descriptive and often had a larger
focus than just language, because
little was known about children
behaviour acquisition .

17. in general ,I will be primarily
concerned with issues regarding
the „acquisition of phonology rather
than „child phonology‟ The latter
term is often used to describe
phonological phenomena found in
child language, without
consideration of theoretical
linguistic issues of

18. All children acquire language in the same
way, regardless of what language they use or
the number of languages they use. Acquiring
a language is like learning to play a game.

19. Children must learn the rules of the
language game, for example how to
articulate words and how to put them
together in ways that are acceptable to
the people around them. In order to
understand child language acquisition,
we need to keep two very important
things in mind

20. Speech sounds are of two major types –
vowels and consonants:
1 -Vowels are sounds produced with no
obstruction to the airflow coming from lungs.

21. 2 - Consonants are speech sounds that
involve a momentary interruption or
obstruction of the airflow. Consonants
can be described and differentiated
from each other by using three main
classifications, voice, place of
articulation, and manner of articulation

22. By Sarah ..

23. Stages of pre-speech vocal development
Even though children do not produce their
first words until they are approximately 12
months old, the ability to produce speech
sounds starts to develop at a much younger
age. Stark (1980) distinguishes five stages of
early speech development:[15

24. weeks: Reflexive vocalizations 0-6
These earliest vocalizations include crying and
vegetative sounds such as breathing, sucking or
sneezing. For these vegetative sounds, infants‟ vocal
cords vibrate and air passes through their vocal
apparatus, thus familiarizing infants with processes
involved in later speech production

25. weeks: Cooing and laughter 6-16
Infants produce cooing sounds when
they are content. Cooing is often
triggered by social interaction with
caregivers and resembles the
production of vowels .

26. weeks: Vocal play 16-30
Infants produce a variety of vowel- and consonant-like sounds
that they combine into increasingly longer sequences. The
production of vowel sounds (already in the first 2 months)
precedes the production ofconsonants, with the first back
consonants (e.g., [g], [k]) being produced around 2–3 months,
and front consonants (e.g., [m], [n], [p]) starting to appear
around 6 months of age

27. months: Reduplicated babbling (or canonical babbling[17 -
Reduplicated babbling contains consonant-vowel (CV) syllables that
are repeated in reduplicated series of the same consonant and vowel
(e.g., [bababa]). At this stage, infants‟ productions resemble speech
much more closely in timing and vocal behaviors than at earlier
stages. Starting around 6 months babies also show an influence of the
ambient language in their babbling, i.e., babies‟ babbling sounds
different depending on which languages they hear

28. months: Nonreduplicated babbling (or variegated -
babbling[17
Infants now combine different vowels and consonants into
syllable strings. At this stage, infants also produce various
stressand intonation patterns. During this transitional period
from babbling to the first word children also produce
“protowords”, i.e., invented

29. By Noha