The Phonological Development of Children

All language learning begins with sounds. Grasping the concept of sound is the first step of language learning and is key for language to develop at a normal rate. This is often why parents subconsciously use 'babytalk' whilst speaking to their infants, making sounds and noises rather than saying whole words, and when they do say whole words, speaking them very slowly and emphasising each letter. But why do children learn language in the way they do?

- Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units - which eventually become meaningful and useful to language development

- When you read, there are spaces between the words. No such spaces occur between spoken words. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.” This can be an extremely challenging aspect of language development.

- However, once a child assigns meaning to certain words language becomes easier to learn and more natural to use. Overgeneralisation is common here though, as sometimes a child can assign the wrong meaning to words. For example they may assign 'Daddy' to all men rather than just their father in particular.

Apparently, the acquisition of native language phonology begins in the womb and isn’t completely adult-like until the teenage years. Perceptual abilities (such as being able to segment “thisisacup” into four individual word units) usually precede production and thus aid the development of speech production.