Process of Language Acquisition.
- At 18 months: nouns and interjection make up 60% of a child’s utterance. At this period, the child begins to utter single words that refers to specific things they have had contact to e.g. ma-ma. They talk predominately about food, people, part of the body, etc. as they use these words they become aware of their roles in community settings.
- At 2years, the child sentence has 12 words, states simple request and description and sentence lacks auxiliaries, articles, connectives and preposition, it is during this stage that child start to combine words with two utterance
- At 2-3 years, the child’s speech consists mainly of nouns, verbs, adjectives and a few pronouns and also hardly any corrections/connectives
- At 3-4 years, child’s distribution of parts of speech in his conversation approximates that of adults
- At the age of 4, children use complete sentences, 6-8 words get longer, complex and complete with plurals, past and future tense. The importance of language in communication makes it necessary for children to acquire it.
Both the environment and innate abilities of a child should be stimulated to encourage language development.