Infant Language Development

Language is a continuous developmental process that is constantly evolving from infancy to adulthood. For the sake of this paper, I will focus on normal language development from birth to five years-old. During the first six months, the infant is considered “the examiner” because the milestones in this stage focus on the infant learning how to interact in his/her environment (Owens, 2004), like orienting to different sounds or roughly identifying different visual stimuli. By two months of age, the infant has fine-tuned oral muscle control, which allows him/her to volitionally move the articulators. This age is also characterized by laughter and cooing, which consists of combinations of back consonants (/k, g, h/), as well as middle and

Eventually, the child’s babbling becomes more adult-like and varies in pitch, rate, and volume; however, the sounds the infant produces differ from those in his/her native language because the infant has not developed the phonological patterns of the language

From eight to twelve months, the infant is in the echolalic stage, which means that the infant produces immediate imitations of their caregiver, including vocalizations and gestures. In addition to imitating their caregiver, the infant uses variegated babbling, where consecutive syllables vary (i.e. “ba-de-goo”). Syllable sequences begin to include consonant-vowel combinations, like VCV and CVC structures, which increases the number of word approximations in the infant’s inventory (Owens, 2004). The next linguistic milestone in this stage is the presence of jargon, which is unintelligible sounds that are in long strings with adult-like intonation and prosody. At seven to ten months, infants are more sensitive to rhythm, which help them segment speech into perceptual units. As the infant approaches his/her first birthday, he/she will produce their first meaningful word (Capute & Accardo, 1978). By this time, the infant can produce words when the specific object’s referent is present. The infant’s first words are typically produced to request something or gain their caregiver’s attention (Owens, 2004). At this stage, the child produces a few words within a short period of time, but then the accelerated development plateaus until the next