Emerging literacy begins in infancy as a parent lifts a baby, looks into her eyes, and speaks softly to her. It's hard to believe that this casual, spontaneous activity is leading to the development of language skills. This pleasant interaction helps the baby learn about the give and take of conversation and the pleasures of communicating with other people.
Young children continue to develop listening and speaking skills as they communicate their needs and desires through sounds and gestures, babble to themselves and others, say their first words, and rapidly add new words to their spoken vocabularies. Most children who have been surrounded by language from birth are fluent speakers by age three, regardless of intelligence, and without conscious effort.
Each of the 6,000 languages in the world uses a different assortment of phonemes – the distinctive sounds used to form words. When adults hear another language, they may not notice the differences in phonemes not used in their own language. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish these differences. Their babbles include many more sounds than those used in their home language. At about 6 to 10 months, babies begin to ignore the phonemes not used in their home language. They babble only the sounds made by the people who talk with them most often.
During their first year, babies hear speech as a series of distinct, but meaningless words. By age 1, most children begin linking words to meaning. They understand the names used to label familiar objects, body parts, animals, and people. Children at this stage simplify the process of learning these labels by making three basic assumptions:
- Labels (words) refer to a whole object, not parts or qualities (Flopsy is a beloved toy, not its head or color).
- Labels refer to classes of things rather than individual items (Doggie is the word for all four-legged animals).
- Anything that has a name can only have one name (for now, Daddy is Daddy, and not a man or Jake).
As children develop their language skills, they give up these assumptions and learn new words and meanings. From this point on, children develop language skills rapidly. Here is a typical sequence:
- At about 18 months, children add new words to their vocabulary at the astounding rate of one every 2 hours.
- By age 2, most children have 1 to 2,000 words and combine two words to form simple sentences such as: "Go out." "All gone."
- Between 24 to 30 months, children speak in longer sentences.
- From 30 to 36 months, children begin following the rules for expressing tense and number and use words such as some, would, and who.
