INTRODUCTION

Human grow their biological and physical development gradually. Unlike animals, which are able to walk soon after their birth, human have to go through some steps before they can do so. First of all baby is on prone  position followed by ability to sit, creeps, stands, walks held by hand/s of adult and finally walks on his own at about  eighteen months or so. As well as in language acquisition, human does not acquire their ability in language at once instant way. With their innate capacity provided in their brain called Language Acquisition Device (LAD) supported and triggered by the conducive and stimulant environment, they go through several steps in acquiring their language as a communication media. Anywhere in part of the world, human infants acquire their language in the same process.                                                                                                                    Observations of children in different language areas of the world show that the stages are similar, possibly universal. Some of the stages last for a short time; others remain longer. Some stages may overlap for a short period, though the transition between stages is often sudden.                                                                                                                                                The stages of language acquisition can be divided into prelinguistic and linguistic stages. Prelinguistic stage is not considered as the language itself like crying, whimpering, and cooing. Linguistic stage begins with babbling, first words, two words to complex organization of meaning and sentence.

BABBLING

            In the first few months , usually around the sixth month, the infant begins to babble. The sounds produced in this period seems to include a large variety of sounds, many of which do not occur in language of the household.                                                                                    One view suggests that it is during this period that children are learning to distinguish between sounds of their language and the sounds that are not the part of their language. During this period children learn to maintain the right sounds and suppress  the wrong ones. Babbling, however, does not seem to be a prerequisite for language acquisition. Infants who are unable  to produce any sounds at this early stage due to physical motor problems begin to talk properly once the disability has been corrected.                                                               Babbling illustrates the sensitivity of the human mind to respond to linguistic cues from a very early stage. This is dramatically demonstrated in Petitto’s studies. During the babbling stage of hearing infants, the pitch, or intonation contours, produced by them begin to resemble the intonation contours of sentence produced by adults. The semantically different intonation contours are among the first linguistic contrast that the children perceive and produce.                                                                                                                                   According to Petitto human are born with a predisposition to discover the units that serve to express linguistic meanings, and that at a genetically specified stage in neural development, the infant will begin to produce these units, sounds, or gestures, depending on the language input the baby receives. Thus babbling is the early stage in language acquisition.

ONE-WORD STAGE         

Commonly this stage starts around one year old. By this time, children have learned that sounds are related to meanings, and they are producing their first words. Most children seem to go through the one word =one-sentence stage. These one-word ”sentences” are called holophrastic sentence (holo means “complete” or “undivided” and phrase means “phrase” or “sentence”).                                                                                                                                           The words in the holophrastic stage serve three major functions : They either are linked with t child’s own action or desire for action ( “up” to express his wish to be picked up), or are used to convey emotion (“no” to express his refusal), or serve a naming function (“da” to express dog, “ma” to express mommy).                                                            Observation of utterances at the one-word stage suggests that children are not rehearsing simple words but expressing single word to convey whole propositions. A child uses the word dada, for example, to mean different things in different contexts: “Here comes Daddy” (upon hearing a key in the  door  at the end of the day); “This is for Daddy” ( when handing a toy to Daddy); “That where usually Daddy sits” (when looking at Daddy’s empty chair at the kitchen); or “This shoe is Daddy’s” ( when touching a shoe belonging to Daddy).

Expression                                         Content

                                                  Here comes Daddy!

“dada”                                       This is for Daddy.

                                                  This is where Daddy sits.

                                                  This Shoe is Daddy’s.

In different contexts, a child may give the same word different intonations. Holding a shoe and uttering Dada, a child is not merely naming the object of its focus but is using a relatively simple expression to communicate relatively complex content.                             This stage varies from child to child. Some go through faster than others and vice versa. The difference does have nothing to do with how intelligent the child is. It is reported that Einstein did not start speak until three or four.

TWO-WORD STAGE

            From the one-word utterance stage, children move on to two-word utterances such as Daddy come, Shoe mine, and Apple me. The transition from the one-word stage to the two-word stage occurs at about 20 months of age, when the child has a vocabulary of about 50 words. At this stage, utterances show a preference for combining a noun like element with a predicate like element, and children tend to verbalize in propositions- to name something and then say something about it.                                                                                                        Children begin to put two words together. At first these utterances appear to be strings of two holophrastic words. Soon, they begin to form actual two-word utterances with clear syntactic and semantic relations. The intonation contour of the two words extends over the whole utterance rather than being separated by a pause between the two words.

            Expression                                         Content

            “Daddy come”                                                Daddy, he is coming.

            “Shoe mine”                                        The shoe, it is mine.

            “Apple  me”                                        The apple, give it to me.

            “More juice”                                        I want more juice.

            “There Daddy”                                   There is Daddy.

            During this stage there are no syntactic or morphological markers, that is no inflections of number, person, tense, and so on. Pronouns are rare, although many children use me to themselves, and some children use other pronouns as well. One striking fact about the two-word utterance stage is that children from different culture appear to express basically similar things in their propositions at this stage.                                                             Bloom has noted that in noun + noun  sentences such as Mommy sock, he two words can express a number of different grammatical relations that will later be expressed by other syntactic devices.  Bloom’s conclusions were reached by observing the situations in which the two word sentence was uttered. Thus, for example, Mommy sock can be used to show  a subject + object relation in the situation when  the mother is putting the sock on the child, or  a possessive relation when the child is pointing to Mommy’s sock. Two nouns can also be used to show a subject-locative relation, as in sweater chair to mean “The sweater is on the chair” or to show conjunction, to mean “sweater and chair”.

            Utterance                                           Content

            “Mommy sock”                                   Mother is putting the sock on him.

                                                                        Those are Mommy’s sock.

            “Sweater chair”                                   The sweater is on the chair.

                                                                        Those are sweater and chair.

COMPLEX UTTERANCES

            As a matter of fact there doesn’t seem to be any three-word sentence stage. When a child starts stringing more than two words together, the utterances may be two, three, four, five words, or longer. Since the age at which children start to produce words and put them together may vary among the children, chronological age is not a good measure of a child’s language development. Instead, progress is typically measured by the average number of morphemes (or sometimes words) in a child’s utterances. Between about two years  and two two-and-a-half years of age, a child’s expression become considerably more complex. Utterances  contain several words representing single clauses.                                                            The first childhood utterances longer than two words have a special characteristic. The function words (grammatical morphemes) such as to, the, can, is, and so on are missing; only the words that carry the main message – content words – occur. Children often sound as if they are reading a Western Union message, which is why such utterances are sometimes called telegraphic speech :

            Cat stand up table       (Cat is standing up on the table)

            What that?                  (What is that?)

            He play little tune       (He is playing a little tune)

            Andrew want that       (Andrew wants that)

            Cathy build house       (Cathy built house)

            No sit here                   (Don’t sit here)

            Apart of lacking grammatical morphemes, these utterances appear to be sentence-like, they have hierarchical, constituent structures similar to the syntactic structures found in the utterances produced by the adult grammar. Children utterances are not simply words that are randomly strung together, but from a very early stage reveal their grasp of the principles of sentence formation.                                                                                                                        Though utterances are described as a telegraphic, the child does not deliberately leave the non content words as does an adult sending a telegram. The sentences reflect the child’s grammar at that particular stage of language development.                                                              Of course, there are many other forms of the adult grammar that the child has not yet fully mastered, including syntactic and morphological matters.

            1. Oh! hurt meself. (upon bumping his arm into a door)

            2. Yeah, that money Neina (Yeah, that money is Neina’s)

            3. Me put it back (I’ll put it back)

Syntactically, no subject is expressed in 1, no verb in 2, and no auxiliary in 3, all of which would be required in well-formed adult utterances. Morphologically, the possessive marker is not fully mastered , the adult subject form of the first person pronoun I and the adult reflexive form myself have not yet been acquired.                                                                                           By around three years of age, utterances containing multiple clause appear, at first coordinating two clause, as in There’s his face and he’s Mister George Happy. Later, children subordinate one clause to another with subordinate like cause, so, and if in the early stages and then why and what : Me don’t know where box is now. Why did you give to her when her been flu?

CONCLUSION

            Acquiring first language is a gradual process, in that it does not come at once. Although all children all over the world go through the same stage, the progress among them is not the same as their chronological age. There is nothing to do between intelligence and the speed of acquiring first language.