Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

3.4 Children’s early language development
Babies are not born talking. They acquire language, starting immediately from birth. The
social setting in which children are exposed to their first language is critical; this is where
they hear their language being used. This is the material they must learn to recognize,
analyse, understand, and produce themselves (Clark, 2009). Children’s cognitive
development at least partially depends on their socialising environment (e.g. Bornstein,
2002).
Young children often acquire their language in a natural, playful manner. In Piaget’s view,
children learn to talk naturally when they are ready without any deliberate teaching by
adults. Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which includes development stages, is a
comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence
(Wardsworth, 1979).
Whether children hear one language or more, start speaking early or late, the language
acquisition of all children occurs gradually through interaction with people and the
environment. Children vary considerably in the speed of their language development. Early
bloomers in language are not necessarily those who will be the great linguists of the future.
Those children whose language development seems slow early on, may be those who catch
up very quickly later (Baker, 1995). A normally developing child speaks its first words around
its first birthday. Several researchers claim the normal range is 8-15 months. There is no
difference between monolingual and bilingual children. Volterra and Taeschner’s (1978)
hypothesis claims that the initial phase of the developing bilingual child is essentially
monolingual (Volterra and Taeschner, 1978). Psycholinguist Oller (1997) compared the
development of babbling and discovered that bilingual and monolingual children start
babbling at the same time.
Baker (1995) presents the average pattern of development for bilingual children from birth
until 4 years onwards in figure 3.1.
Age
First year
Around 1 year old
During second year
3 to 4 years
4 years onwards
Language
Babbling, cooing, laughing (dada, mama, gaga)
First understandable words
Two-words combinations, moving slowly to threeand
four- word combinations. Three-element
sentences (e.g. ‘Daddy come now’; ‘That my book’;
‘Teddy gone bye-byes’)
Dramatic changes. Simple but increasingly longer
sentences. Grammar and sentences structuring
starts to develop. Conversations show turn taking
Increasingly complex sentences, structure and
ordered conversation. Use pronouns and auxiliary
verbs.
Figure 3.1 The general average pattern of development for bilingual children (Baker, 1995: 46).
54