First Words

The next major task in the acquisition of phonology involves understanding the words as a link between sound and meaning. The first, children acquire the concept of a word at the approximate age of 12-16 months. These first words show tremendous variability in pronunciation. Some may be perfect adults pronunciations, others may be so distorted that they are comprehensible only to the child’s closest companions. Still vary considerable in their pronunciation from one occasion to the next. Because of this instability, psychologists have come to believe that children do not show an understanding of phonemes in their first words.

                                                                                                                      

Babbling

At the six months, normal children in all cultures begin to babble, producing long sequences of vowels and consonants. Babbling resemble adult language in a number of important respects.

Psycholinguistic and linguists have concluded that babbling has at least two functions, there are:

Babbling serves primarily as practice for later speech. This is intuitively plausible because the fine motor movements necessary for accurate articulation are exercised extensively during babbling indeed, babbling children produce a greater variety of sounds.

Children babble for social reward. According to some psychologists, babbling is the child’s first experienced with the social character of language. Evidence for the importance of the social factor in babbling comes from the study of severely neglected children.

According to one hypothesis, children babble because language development involves a process of biological maturation. Thus babbling occurs automatically when the relevant structure in the brain reach a critical level of development.  

Source: Dr. Sujoko, MA. Psycholinguistics Module. UNS.