From Incomprehensibility to Fluency: 1-3 year-old Children’s Language Development746
Hiba Chendeb El Mourad
العدد الثاني – تشرين الثاني نوفمبر 2019
Pages 24-48
Abstract
The focal point of this research study is the language acquisition process and the linguistic development of 1-3 year-old children. It examines the three factors that impact language learning, i.e (1) the parents’ contribution to the learning of phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures, (2) the intelligence level, and (3) the sociability. For a period of two years, the researcher conducted a case study where she traced the linguistic progress and observed all the linguistic aspects of the development of two male Lebanese children whose native language is Arabic, from the age of one till the age of three, through recording and pursuing the emergence of new naturalistic unprompted sounds, morphemes, grammatical and syntactical constructions, and whole utterances. She also observed how parents’ reinforcement of the linguistic structures, their children’s level of intelligence and sociability affected their interaction with the environment as well as their communicative competence. The findings of the study show that in spite of the fact that the three factors were the same for both children, the acquisition of the elder is remarkably better than that of the younger one. This is a solid proof of the mentalist theories of language innateness that conceive the existence of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which enables children to acquire language at different rates because of the variability in the activity of cells in the Broca’s area of the left hemisphere of the brain. Imitation played a significant role in the language development of the younger child whose vocabulary jumped from a few words to a wide range within a period of two months only. Hence, based on the observations conducted, the researcher recommends that parents and teachers gain an extensive understanding of this period of life to contribute to boosting language learning and enhancing their children’s myriad linguistic abilities.
Keywords: First language acquisition, language development factors, 1-3 year-old children, phonological, morphological, and syntactical structures, language reinforcement.
