Phonological Development:

According to Sook Whan Cho and Willam OGrandy (1987) childrens acquisition of
language is one of the most intriguing phenomenon studied by linguists which is a major
intellectual achievement. In recent decades, a large amount of linguistic research has focused
on how children master the complexities of human language. The phenomenon of linguistic
development is considered as linguistic acquisition which includes the acquisition of
grammar. Childrens phonological development is one major area of studies in this regard (p.
464).

Phonological Development:
Most studies of what very young children perceive about speech have depended on
observations of what they seem to attend to at different ages (E. Kaplan and Kaplan, 1970).
One of the first things is the location of sounds. Infants turn their heads toward the source of
a sound within the first few days of birth. Within a couple of weeks they seem to discriminate
voices from other sounds. By about two months, they seem to respond differentially to the
emotional equality of human voices. By four months, they seem able to distinguish male and
female voices, and six months or so, observers have claimed, they begin to pay attention to
intonation and rhythm in speech since they start to produce babbled sequences of sound with
a melodic contour (Clark, H. V. and Clark, E. V., 1977, p. 377).

They can recognize their mothers voice within a matter of weeks. From around one month of
age, children exhibit the ability to distinguish among certain speech sounds. There are
different stages of this phonological development. The first stage is recognized as babbling.
The ability to produce speech sounds begins to emerge around six months of age, with the
onset of babbling. Babbling provides children with the opportunity to experiment with and

begin to gain control over their vocal apparatusan important prerequisite for later speech.
Children who are unable to babble for medical reasons (because of the need for a breathing
tube in their throat, for example) can subsequently acquire normal pronunciation, but their
speech development is significantly delayed. Despite obvious differences among the
languages to which they are exposed, children from different linguistic communities exhibit
significant similarities in their babbling. The tendencies in table below are based on data from
fifteen different languages, including English, Thai, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and Mayan with
the focus on consonant sounds as it was somewhat more reliable than the vowel sounds.

Table: Cross-linguistic similarities in babbling

Frequently Found Consonants Infrequently Found Consonants
pbm
fv
tdn

td

kg

lr

shwj
Such cross-linguistic similarities suggest that early babbling is at least partly independent of
the particular language to which children are exposed. In fact, even deaf children babble,
although their articulatory activity is somewhat less varied than that of hearing children.

Babbling increases in frequency until the age of about twelve months, at which time it begins
to give way to intelligible words. By the time children have acquired fifty words or so
(usually by around eighteen months of age), they begin to adopt fairly regular patterns of
pronunciation. Although there is a good deal of variation from child to child in terms of the
order in which speech sounds are mastered in production and perception, the following
general tendencies seem to exist.
As a group, vowels are generally acquired before consonants (by age three).

 Stops tend to be acquired before other consonants.

In terms of place of articulation, labials are often acquired first, followed (with some
variation) by alveolars, velars, and alveopalatals. Interdentals (such as [] and []) are
acquired last.
New phonemic contrasts manifest themselves first in word-initial position. Thus, the
/p/-/b/ contrast, for instance, is manifested in pairs such as pat-bat before mop-mob.

By age two, a typical English-speaking child has the inventory of consonant phonemes shown
in table below:
Table: Typical consonant inventory at age two
Stops
Fricatives
pbm
f
tdn

Other
w

kg

By age four, this inventory is considerably larger and typically includes the sounds shown
in table below:
Table: Typical consonant inventory at age four
Stops
Fricatives
Affricates
pbm
fv
t d

Other
wj

tdn

sz

lr

kg

Still to be acquired at this age are the interdental fricatives [] and [] and the voiced
alveopalatal fricative []. In general, the relative order in which sounds are acquired reflects
their distribution in the worlds languages. The sounds that are acquired early tend to be

found in more languages whereas the sounds that are acquired late tend to be less common
across languages.

In the later years, children gradually develop the process of syllable deletion, syllable
simplification, substitution, and assimilation, and also develop their vocabulary (OGrandy,
W. and Cho, S., W., 1987, pp. 466 -471).

Children perceive stress fairly early but that is difficult to determine. Several investigators
have noticed that two- and three-year-olds do not use intonations reliably and at times come
out with wrong melodies. (Clark, H. V. and Clark, E. V., 1977, pp. 382-384).

Reference:
Clark, H. V. and Clark, E. V. (1977). Psychology and Language: An introduction to
psycholinguistics. USA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Cho, S. W., & OGrandy, W. (1987). Language acquisition: the emergence of grammar. In
OGrady, W., Cho, S. W. (Eds.). Contemporary linguistics an introduction. (1st ed.:
1987, pp. 464- 471). United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.