Phonological and Morphological Acquisition s between 12 months and Age 7

Between the ages of 12 and 7, phonological and morphological acquisitions occur.

Phonological and morphological stages of development are critical in a child’s speech development process. The two have an impact on a child’s degree of intelligibility between the ages of 12 months and 7 years. The capacity to recognize and speak aloud different words in their various intricacies is crucial.

Roger Brown described this type of language development, emphasizing the numerous qualities of how youngsters gain the ability to talk clearly. A morpheme is a unit of speech that corresponds to simple word syllables. Brown’s stage 1 occurs between 12 and 26 months, during which a child is expected to gain the mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLUm’s) (Bowen, 2016). At this stage, they are able to recognize 50 to 60 words and are able to construct stage 1 type sentences that include action and agent/object/locative. Between 27 and 30 months of age, the child develops the recognition of present progressive tenses as well as plural forms. At Stage three, between 31 and 34 months, they are able to develop ability to form sentences with irregular past tense as well as possessive forms. Stage 4 comes between 35-40 months when a child is able to construct sentences with articles, regular past tense, as well as third person regular forms. At Stage 5, between 41 and 46 months, the child is able to fully understand a language and can construct third person irregular sentences, uncontractible auxiliary, contractible copula and later on at the age of 4 years, contractible auxiliary.

Phonological Development

Phonology is a systematic organization of parts of speech into an intelligible language. This skill is acquired by age and cannot be taught to children. The first stage of phonological development comes between 1.5 and 2 years of age. At this stage, children are able to track particular simple words in sentences. By the age of 4 years, children are able to recognize alliteration and rhythm, meaning that they can fully understand the language. Syllable awareness comes at the age of 5, a stage at which children are able to manipulate syllables for different meanings. Rhythm manipulation then develops at the age of 5.5 years (Hua, 2002). Phoneme awareness comes between 6 and 9 years, after which a child is ready to learn general vocabulary that enables them to develop full language skills

During the stages of development described above, children ought to be introduced to reading and writing in order to develop full awareness of words and their meanings. This phase normally occurs at the age of 3 years for most children when they join kindergarten. Reading and writing skills develop essential language awareness skills.

References

Bowen, C. (2016, June 10). Brown’s Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development. Retrieved from http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33:brown&catid=2:uncategorised&Itemid=117

Hua, Z. (2002). Phonological Development in Specific Contexts: Studies of Chinese-speaking Children. Multilingual Matters.