7 Language acquisition as skill acquisition
Think for a moment about the way in which children learn any new skill, like riding a bike. Their performance tends to follow a predictable pattern. To begin with there is focused effort and repetition, where performance improves as a result of practice. Then there is a stage of learning where performance can improve in the absence of direct engagement or practice, until eventually the skill becomes automatic. Children go from effortful, deliberate and hesitant performance to being able to execute skills fluently, flexibly and without awareness. Learning language is also learning a new skill so each time children learn something new about language – a new word or a new phrase – they also tend to go through this shift from effort to automatisation.
In the next activity you’ll think about exactly what develops and when.
Activity 5 What develops when?
Children achieve many milestones on the journey of language acquisition. See if you can drag and drop these major milestones into the typical sequence children first acquire them.
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There are several key messages we can take from this activity.
- In language development, simpler skills usually lay the foundations for more complex skills that are learned later. Many of the skills shown above describe children producing or expressing language. It is an interesting fact that children generally reach milestones of production much later than comprehension. For example, they understand a word much earlier than they can say it.
- The activity deliberately has the scale as younger to older rather than years and months to emphasise that there is no universal timetable that all children follow. The sequence of acquisition tends to be much more predictable than the absolute times children achieve those milestones. For instance, children typically start uttering their first words around their first birthday, but it is important to emphasise that there is wide natural variation around that milestone. As you progress through the course you will learn the range of factors that cause individual differences between children.
- The boxes in the diagram suggest a neat division between these skills but often they overlap in development. For example, many children will be saying two-word phrases like ‘all gone’ and ‘more juice’ at the time they start using first words. Whether infants are using them as two words or one chunk is a question you will explore. Constructing a language is a bit like clicking smaller bits of Lego (words) together to form bigger parts (phrases) but it is also a process and breaking some larger chunks down to make new pieces.