First Language Acquisition Essay

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According to most linguists, language starts from the womb before birth. It is not taught but rather a natural occurrence that happens very fast; while phonological learning start right from birth, between 0 month to thirty six months, an infant is quite able to understand most of the basis of speech like phonemes, morphemes, parts of speech, phrases and order of phrases. According to behaviorist, first language acquisition is systematic, but for the nativist it is innate. At birth, a child has universal grammar which is a language acquisition device in the brain that is adapt for learning and acquire language. The phenomenon of first language acquisition, that is only attributes to human, takes place not by the intervention of teaching …show more content…

It is a process that requires many steps before taking place because it is not genetically inherited despite that there is an innate predisposition factor that support the occurrence of language for children regardless of country of origin, race, class, economic status or gender. Dr. Klass, in her writing, emphasizes in the importance of babbling, which are well formed syllables, and the similarity that coexist among all children, which is the key of first language acquisition. Cooing and babbling which are the first step in language acquisition, produce sequences of vowel like sounds as [i], [u], [k], [g], [m]. Cooing is describes as the first use of speech like sound by a baby, which happens in the first few months after birth. At this stage, the child produces some high vowels sounds like[i] and [u]. As the child progresses, he or she is able to use velar consonants like [k] and [g] by the age of four months old. Then, babbling starts between the age of six and eight months, usually when the baby is sitting up and start making a combination of different vowels and consonant sounds like ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga, and which in time will change when the baby is about ten months old with a more complex enunciation with the patterns of the consonant and vowel combination as well as the variation such a: ba-ba-da-da, ma-ma-ma, da-da-ba. According to Dr. Klass, babies that are seven months old and don’t voice with many consonants, as mentioned above, and only repeat aaaa and ooo sound are less likely to develop first language acquisition that can eventually lead to word formation for language to develop. In other words, sound of language is a learning process. For instance one needs to know to a ‘p’ sound the two lips has to be close to each other and one needs to puff the out of your mouth. This is a process that must be learned agreeing with the

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