Child Language Development Stages & Brain Areas
Language Development
Phonological Development
The child passes through different stages until age 6.
Prelinguistic Stage (Birth to First Words, 0-12 Months)
The child makes sounds involuntarily, such as sneezing and burping, and then emits gurgling cries and guttural sounds. From 3-4 months, the child emits sounds like voluntary babbling, developing simple, reduplicated, and finally variegated babbling, which is not quite yet close to the first words.
Language Phase (12 Months – 7 Years)
The babbling disappears. Children use strategies:
- Strategies with Little Distortion: Child avoids some sounds and uses favorite sounds (e.g., ‘kaqui’, ‘kaguya’).
- Strategies with Much Distortion: Consonant substitution (e.g., ‘touse’ for ‘house’), syllable structure modification (e.g., ‘toto’ for ‘foolish’), segmental assimilation (e.g., ‘papo’ for ‘shoe’).
Semantic Development
Presemantic Phase (12-18 Months)
Children first pronounce their words, but the mental category is based on associations between the word and something called by the child.
Semantic Phase (18 Months – 4 Years)
The lexicon grows, doubling every year. Children build mental categories using two implicit semantic mechanisms:
- Overextension: (e.g., ‘ball’ is everything round)
- Underextension: (e.g., ‘water’ only in the bathtub)
4-7 Years
The child internally organizes meanings and related concepts or semantic fields. The child’s vocabulary increases, influenced by reading comprehension, and they improve understanding and inferring meaning from words based on context.
Morphosyntactic Development
- 12-18 Months: Children first pronounce their words and repeat words they hear, but saying them in no logical order.
- 18-24 Months: The child speaks in telegraphic sentences of 2 elements, with absent prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and suffixes.
- 2 Years – 2.5 Years: Expressions of 3 elements include the auxiliary verb “be” and articles. Simple sentences of 3 elements arise.
- 2.5 Years and Older: Expressions of 4 or more elements. The child advances morphologically, distinguishing gender and number, and finally acquires basic structures and advances in morphosyntax.
Pragmatic Development (Proto-Pragmatics)
- To 9 Months: The adult interacts with the baby.
- 9-12 Months: Deictic gestures (proto-imperative, involving requests; proto-declarative, showing or giving an indication, with the objective of sharing attention with others). These gestures disappear as the child learns to speak.
- Development of Language Functions Through Words (from 12 Months On):
- 12 Months: Instrumental function.
- 15 Months: Imaginative, personal, and heuristic functions.
- 21 Months: Regulatory function.
- 2 to 3 Years: The above functions decrease and give way to interactional and informative functions.
Brain Areas for Language
- Frontal Lobe:
- Area 6 (Motor Area): Responsible for activity (movement).
- Area 4 (Premotor Area): Coordinates the movement of Area 6.
- Area 8: Controls ocular movements.
- Areas 44-45 (Broca’s Area): A very important area for language. Damage here means the person understands but cannot speak.
- Parietal Lobe:
- Areas 1, 2, 3 (Somatosensory Area): Responsible for information that comes through touch (cold, heat, etc.).
- Occipital Lobe:
- Areas 17, 18, 19 (Visual Association Area): This is where we really see.
- Temporal Lobe:
- Areas 41-42 (Auditory Association Area): Processes auditory information.
- Area 22 (Wernicke’s Area): Very important and responsible for comprehension and the correct syntactical structuring of language. Damage here means the person speaks without understanding and does not understand others.