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Infants first begin vocalizing by crying, followed by cooing and then vocal play. These first forms of sound production are the easiest for children to use because they contain natural, reflexive, mostly vowel sounds. Babbling usually occurs in all children acquiring language. [4]
Whereas 1-month-olds only exhibit this preference if the full speech signal is played to them, 4-month-old infants prefer infant-directed speech even when just the pitch contours are played. [6] This shows that between 1 and 4 months of age, infants improve in tracking the suprasegmental information in the speech directed at them.
Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice and differentiate them from other sounds after birth.
Young toddlers acquire one to three words per month. A vocabulary spurt often occurs over time as the number of words learned accelerates. It is believed that most children add about 10 to 20 new words a week. [13] Between the ages of 18 and 24 months, children learn how to combine two words such as no bye-bye and more please. [5]
Perceptual reorganisation with regards to linguistic pitch occurs in children within 6 and 9 months of age. On the other hand, with regards to intonation, head-turn preference experiments have shown that by 4 to 5 months of age, infants are already sensitive to intonational units in speech. [11]
Hazan and Barrett (2000) [6] suggest that this development can cotton into late childhood; 6- to 12-year-old children showed increasing mastery of discriminating synthesized differences in place, manner, and voicing of speech sounds without yet achieving adult-like accuracy in their own production.
The third stage of speech production is articulation, which is the execution of the articulatory score by the lungs, glottis, larynx, tongue, lips, jaw and other parts of the vocal apparatus resulting in speech. [8] [10] For right handed people, the majority of speech production activity occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere.
Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition. It studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whether that is a spoken language or a sign language, [1] though it can also refer to bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), referring to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages.