How do children learn language?

      When do children start learning language?

Children start learning language before they are born. Five months into pregnancy a baby’s hearing develops and it begins to hear everything its mother says. From that moment the baby begins to hear and start to process every word it hears. The transition from simple hearing to processing the words and learning language can be thought of in three steps:

1. Learning sounds- A baby is born with the capacity and ability to make every sound in every language. It can produce all of the 150 sounds that make up every language in the world. Then, through hearing its parents speak, the baby picks up which sounds it will need to speak the same language as their parents. This process of learning and eliminating the phonemes that aren’t required is known as ‘phonemic awareness’. This is important to a child’s reading skills that will develop in the future. This happens after about 6 months.

2. Learning words- In this stage a child learns what sounds mean and what sounds go together to mean different things. They also learn word boundaries. This is the recognition of where one word ends and another begins. They also learn that adding morphemes such as an ‘-s’ to the end of a word means that there is more than one of something. This begins to happen from around 8 to 12 months of age. 

3. Learning sentences- In this final stage a child learns how to place words in the correct order to make a sentence. They also learn what makes sense and what is grammatically correct. This stage usually happens at around 30 to 36 months old.

Through this process children all over the world learn to speak the language of their parents. They learn to use one of the primary sources of communication this way that without it, it would be very difficult to function in society.

Websites used-

http://www.indiaparenting.com/boards/showmessage.cgi?messageid=3241&table_name=dis_healthissues

http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/language_learning.htm