Learning language is a natural process babies are born knowing how to do. Interestingly, all children, no matter which language their parents speak, learn it in the same way.
Overall, there are three stages of language development, and they occur in a familiar pattern. So, when children are trying to master their native tongue, they follow an expected series of milestones. However, note that individual children will progress at their own pace along this timeline within an expected range of deviation.
The first stage is learning sounds.
When babies are born, they are able to hear and distinguish all the sounds in all the languages in the world. That’s about 150 sounds in about 6500 languages, though no language uses all of those sounds.
(The sounds a language uses are called phonemes and English has about 44.)
In this stage, babies learn which phonemes belong to the language they are learning and which don't. The ability to recognize and produce them is called "phonemic awareness."
The best way to promote language development for babies is simple: just talk to them. Babies learn by experiencing (and listening to) the world around them, so the more they are exposed to it the better.
Additionally, you can put words to their actions. Talk to them as you would in conversation, pausing for them to respond, then you can say back what you think they might say if they could. But keep in mind that simply talking to them attentively is enough for them to pick up the language.
Language development stage number two is learning words.
At this stage, children learn how the sounds in a language are put together to make meaning. For example, they realize that the sounds m-ah-m-ee refer to the “being” who cuddles and feeds them.
This is a very significant step because everything we say is really just a stream of sounds. To make sense of those sounds, a child must be able to recognize where one word ends and another one begins. These are called “word boundaries.”
However, children are not learning words, per se. They are actually learning morphemes, which are the smallest chunks words can be broken into. A morpheme may be a word on its own or may be combined with other morphemes to form one. So in “mommy,” there are two morphemes: "ma" and "mee."
You can help your child build their language skills by reading to them often. And of course, by having more child-centric conversations with them. Research shows that babies learn language best within a social context.
Another way to encourage their communication and social skills is to mimic their noises and say them back to them. You can also mirror their facial expressions and describe their actions as well as narrate what is happening around them.
The third language development stage is learning sentences.
That means they start putting words in the correct order. For example, they learn that in English we say "I want a cookie" and "I want a chocolate cookie," not "Want I a cookie" or "I want cookie chocolate."
Children also begin to pick up on the difference between grammatical correctness and meaning. Noam Chomsky highlighted this in the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
Children will know that although the sentence is grammatically correct, it's nonsense.
