Children's language development

Phonological development: from crying to speech#

FoundationAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

Stages of early spoken development

Fig. 1The approximate sequence of early spoken-language development (ages are typical and overlap, not a fixed timetable).

Children's spoken development is conventionally described in stages, and the phonological stages of the first years are well documented (ages are approximate and overlap). In the first weeks infants produce reflexive vocalisations - crying and other biologically driven sounds. Cooing (around two to five months) brings vowel-like sounds and experimentation with the vocal tract. Babbling (from around six months) is the crucial phase: first reduplicated babbling (repeated consonant-vowel syllables such as 'mamama') and then variegated babbling with varied sounds, during which the child practises the phonemes of the ambient language and begins to lose sensitivity to sounds not used around them.

The holophrastic or one-word stage (around twelve months) produces single words that function as whole utterances - 'milk' meaning 'I want milk' - so that one word carries a phrase's worth of meaning, decoded from context and intonation. As speech develops, children systematically simplify adult pronunciation through phonological processes: deletion of final or unstressed consonants ('do' for 'dog'), consonant cluster reduction ('poon' for 'spoon'), substitution such as fronting and stopping ('tar' for 'car', 'dis' for 'this'), and assimilation. These are not random errors but rule-governed simplifications that reveal the child working out the sound system.

The order in which sounds are mastered is broadly patterned: sounds made at the front of the mouth and plosives tend to come earlier, while fricatives, affricates and clusters, and sounds such as the 'th' phonemes and /r/, are typically mastered later, sometimes well into the school years. This is why 'th' and 'r' errors persist longest. Prosody develops alongside segments: infants attend to and produce intonation patterns early, and use rising and falling contours meaningfully before they have many words.

Analysing phonological data means naming the processes precisely (deletion, substitution, cluster reduction, assimilation) and interpreting them as evidence of systematic learning rather than deficiency. Crucially, these simplifications support the argument that acquisition is rule-governed and creative: a child who says 'tar' for 'car' is applying a consistent fronting rule, not merely failing to imitate. This point becomes central in the theory debate, where the systematicity of children's 'errors' is used against a purely imitative account. Caregiver speech, often called child-directed speech, with its higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, slower tempo and clear articulation, is thought to support this phonological learning by making the sound system more salient.

Worked example

Analysing phonological simplification

A two-year-old says 'i want a nana' for 'I want a banana' and 'gog' for 'dog'. Analyse the phonology.

Analyse 'nana'
The unstressed initial syllable of 'banana' is deleted (weak-syllable deletion), leaving the stressed portion - a systematic reduction, not a random slip.
Analyse 'gog'
The initial /d/ is assimilated to the final /g/, so both consonants become /g/ (consonant harmony/assimilation) - the child regularises the word to a single place of articulation.
Note the systematicity
Both forms follow consistent phonological processes that make adult words easier to articulate; the same processes would apply to other words of the same shape.
Draw the conclusion
The child is not failing to imitate but applying rules, evidence that phonological development is systematic and creative - a point that supports nativist and cognitive accounts over pure behaviourism.

Result: 'nana' shows weak-syllable deletion and 'gog' shows consonant assimilation - consistent, rule-governed simplifications showing the child systematically constructing the sound system rather than merely mis-imitating adult speech.

Typical mistakes

Describing children's pronunciations as random 'mistakes' rather than analysing them as consistent, rule-governed phonological processes.
Confusing the stages or attaching them to exact ages - the ages are approximate and the stages overlap, so treat them as a sequence, not a timetable.

Active revision

Analyse a transcript of a young child's speech, identifying the phonological processes at work and explaining what they reveal about how the child is acquiring the sound system.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for English language (Department for Education)

Lexical and semantic development#

StandardAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

Aitchison's stages of lexical development

Fig. 2Aitchison's three stages of lexical and semantic development, from attaching labels to organising the vocabulary into a connected network.

Vocabulary grows slowly at first and then rapidly - the 'vocabulary spurt' or naming explosion from around eighteen months. Katherine Nelson's study of first words found that they cluster into categories, the largest being naming words for concrete entities (people, food, animals, toys), followed by action words, modifiers and personal/social words. Children's early lexis is heavily weighted towards the here-and-now and the concrete, and towards high-frequency items in their environment, which is why first words are so often 'mummy', 'dada', 'milk', 'no' and the names of familiar objects and animals.

Early word meanings rarely match adult meanings exactly. Overextension applies a word too broadly - calling all four-legged animals 'dog', or all round objects 'ball' - and is often based on shared perceptual features (shape, size, movement). Underextension applies a word too narrowly - using 'dog' only for the family pet and not for dogs in general. These are not signs of confusion but of a child building and revising semantic categories, working out where the boundaries of a word's meaning lie. Overextension in particular shows the child actively generalising rather than passively storing labels.

Jean Aitchison proposed three stages in lexical and semantic development that capture this process. Labelling is the link between a sound sequence and the thing it refers to - the discovery that things have names. Packaging is the harder task of working out the full range a label covers - discovering that 'dog' includes the neighbour's dog and the dog on television but not the cat - and it is during packaging that over- and underextension occur. Network-building is the gradual mapping of connections between words - synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and semantic fields - so that vocabulary becomes an organised system rather than a list.

Analysing lexical data means classifying the child's words (by Nelson's categories or by word class), identifying over- and underextension and their perceptual basis, and relating the development to the input the child receives. The concrete, high-frequency, here-and-now character of early lexis connects to the theory debate: it supports interactionist and cognitive accounts in which children name what they experience and what caregivers highlight, while the creativity of overextension - producing meanings never modelled by adults - is evidence against a purely imitative, behaviourist view. Lexical development also links forward to semantic change, since the categorisation processes children use are the same ones that reshape word meanings over history.

Worked example

Analysing overextension

A child uses 'moon' for the moon, then for a slice of lemon, a round doorknob and a letter 'O'. Analyse the semantic development.

Name the phenomenon
This is overextension: the label 'moon' is applied too broadly, beyond its adult range.
Identify the basis
The extensions share a perceptual feature - roundness/curved shape - so the overextension is category-based on shape, a common basis in early development.
Locate it in Aitchison's model
The child is in the packaging stage, working out which objects the label covers - and has (temporarily) drawn the boundary around 'round things' rather than 'the moon'.
Draw the theoretical point
The child produces uses of 'moon' no adult ever modelled, so the meaning is being actively generalised, not imitated - evidence for cognitive/nativist over behaviourist accounts.

Result: The child overextends 'moon' on the basis of shared roundness - a packaging-stage generalisation the child constructs rather than copies, showing active semantic category-building and undermining a purely imitative account.

Typical mistakes

Confusing overextension (too broad) with underextension (too narrow), or failing to explain the perceptual basis of an overextension.
Treating early word meanings as simply 'wrong' rather than as evidence of a child actively building semantic categories.

Active revision

Analyse a child-language sample for lexical development: classify the words, identify any over- or underextension, and explain what the evidence shows about how the child is building word meanings.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: AQA AS and A-level English Language (7702) specification (AQA)

Grammatical development and virtuous errors#

StandardAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

The logic of a virtuous error

Fig. 3A virtuous error such as 'goed' shows the child extracting and productively applying a rule - evidence of creative, rule-governed grammar rather than imitation.

Grammar emerges in a recognised sequence. The two-word stage (around eighteen months) produces utterances with consistent word order that already express grammatical relations - 'daddy go', 'more juice', 'mummy sock' - showing an early grasp of syntax. The telegraphic stage (around two years) produces longer utterances that retain the content words but omit grammatical or function words and inflections, like a telegram - 'daddy go work', 'me want that'. The post-telegraphic stage sees the gradual filling-in of the missing determiners, auxiliaries, prepositions and inflections, and the mastery of increasingly complex structures including subordination.

Inflectional morphology develops in a broadly consistent order (Roger Brown's research documented a typical sequence of grammatical morphemes such as the '-ing', plural '-s', past-tense '-ed' and third-person '-s'). The most theoretically important phenomenon here is overgeneralisation, also called a virtuous error: once a child extracts a rule such as 'add -ed for past tense', they apply it even to irregular verbs the adult language exempts, producing 'goed', 'runned', 'wented', and similarly 'sheeps', 'mouses', 'foots'. These forms are 'virtuous' because they are never heard from adults - they show the child has abstracted a productive grammatical rule and is applying it logically.

Jean Berko's 'wug test' famously demonstrated this rule-knowledge experimentally: shown a novel creature ('this is a wug') and then two of them, young children supply 'wugs', pluralising a word they have never encountered. Since the word is invented, the child cannot be imitating a heard form; they must be applying an internalised morphological rule. The wug test is a cornerstone piece of evidence for the argument that grammatical development is rule-governed and creative, and it is regularly cited against behaviourist accounts.

Questions and negation also develop through recognisable stages: early negation attaches 'no' to the front of an utterance ('no want bed'), later integrating it correctly with auxiliaries; questions move from intonation-only ('doggy gone?') through wh-words to correct auxiliary inversion. Analysing grammatical data means identifying the stage, naming the structures (word class, sentence function, inflection), and above all interpreting virtuous errors correctly as evidence of rule-formation. This is the point in the topic where the imitation-versus-innateness debate is most sharply joined, because overgeneralisation and the wug test are precisely the data a purely imitative theory cannot explain.

Worked example

Interpreting overgeneralisation

A child who previously said 'went' now says 'I goed to nanny's and we runned fast'. Analyse the grammar.

Note the U-shaped pattern
The child earlier produced the correct irregular 'went' (likely rote-learned), but now produces 'goed' - an apparent regression that is actually progress.
Name the process
'goed' and 'runned' are overgeneralisations/virtuous errors: the regular past-tense rule 'add -ed' is applied to irregular verbs.
Explain the significance
The child has now abstracted the '-ed' rule and is applying it systematically; the 'errors' appear precisely because the rule has been learned, which is why they replace earlier correct forms.
Deploy in the theory debate
No adult models 'goed', so it cannot be imitation; it is strong evidence for rule-governed, creative acquisition (nativist/cognitive) and against pure behaviourism.

Result: 'goed' and 'runned' are virtuous errors marking the point at which the child has internalised the productive past-tense rule; the U-shaped development from correct 'went' to incorrect 'goed' shows learning a rule, not forgetting a word - decisive evidence against imitation-only accounts.

Typical mistakes

Treating virtuous errors as simple mistakes or signs of poor learning, rather than as positive evidence that the child has internalised a productive rule.
Calling any short utterance 'telegraphic' - telegraphic speech specifically omits function words and inflections while keeping content words in order.

Active revision

Analyse a transcript for grammatical development, identifying the stage and any virtuous errors, and explain what the errors reveal about the child's grammatical rule-knowledge.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for English language (Department for Education)

Functions and pragmatics of early language#

StandardAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

Halliday's functions of early language

Fig. 4Halliday's seven functions of early language: children first use language to meet social needs, and later to explore, imagine and inform.

Children acquire not just forms but the ability to DO things with language, and M. A. K. Halliday's account of the functions of early language is the standard framework. He identified seven functions that children develop: instrumental (using language to satisfy needs - 'want milk'), regulatory (to control others' behaviour - 'go away'), interactional (to build and maintain relationships - 'love you'), personal (to express identity and feelings - 'me like it'), heuristic (to explore and learn about the world - 'what dat?'), imaginative (for play and pretend - creating a story world) and representational (to convey information and facts - 'it red'). The first four tend to emerge earliest, serving the child's immediate social needs, with the more abstract heuristic, imaginative and representational functions developing as language matures.

Pragmatic development is the growth of the child's ability to use language appropriately in context - to take turns, to make and respond to requests, to be relevantly informative, and eventually to grasp politeness, indirectness and implicature. Early conversational skills are scaffolded by caregivers, who fill turns, interpret generously, and expand the child's contributions. Over time children learn adjacency-pair conventions, how to open and close exchanges, how to repair misunderstandings, and how to adjust their speech to different listeners - a skill that develops well beyond the early years.

The functional and pragmatic dimensions are important because they show that acquisition is driven by communicative purpose, not merely by copying forms. A child who says 'more' to get another biscuit is using the instrumental function effectively long before they can produce a grammatical request, which supports the interactionist view that language develops in and for social interaction. Halliday's framework also lets the analyst move beyond describing what a child says to explaining what the child is DOING with each utterance, adding a pragmatic layer to the analysis of any transcript.

Analysing functions and pragmatics means labelling each utterance's function (using Halliday's categories), identifying conversational features (turn-taking, requests, responses, repairs) and, crucially, relating them to the interactional context and the caregiver's contributions. This connects directly to the theory debate: the centrality of function and interaction is the core of the social-interactionist case (Vygotsky, Bruner), while the child's ability to mean more than they can grammatically encode is evidence of the cognitive drive to communicate. A strong essay integrates the functional analysis with the formal (phonological, lexical, grammatical) analysis to give a rounded account of what the child can do with language and why.

Worked example

Labelling functions in a transcript

A child says: (reaching) 'want that'; (pushing toy at parent) 'you do it'; (hugging) 'nice mummy'; (pointing) 'what dat?'. Label the functions.

'want that'
Instrumental function: the child uses language to satisfy a material need (to obtain an object).
'you do it'
Regulatory function: the child uses language to direct another person's behaviour.
'nice mummy'
Interactional function: the utterance builds and maintains the relationship, expressing affection.
'what dat?'
Heuristic function: the child uses language to explore and learn about the environment, seeking information.

Result: The four utterances realise the instrumental, regulatory, interactional and heuristic functions respectively - showing the child using language purposefully to meet needs, direct others, bond and explore, well ahead of full grammatical competence, which supports the interactionist emphasis on communicative purpose.

Typical mistakes

Listing Halliday's functions without applying them to the actual utterances in the data.
Ignoring the interactional context and the caregiver's role, and so missing the pragmatic and interactionist significance of the data.

Active revision

Analyse a caregiver-child transcript for the functions of the child's language (Halliday) and the pragmatic features of the exchange, explaining how the interaction supports the child's development.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: AQA AS and A-level English Language (7702) specification (AQA)

Theories of language acquisition#

AdvancedAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

Theories of acquisition compared

Fig. 5The main theories emphasise different factors; a balanced evaluation recognises that innate capacity, cognition and social interaction all contribute to acquisition.

The behaviourist account, associated with B. F. Skinner, holds that language is learned like any other behaviour, through imitation, and operant conditioning - reinforcement of correct forms and correction of errors. Children copy the speech around them and are rewarded (by comprehension, praise or getting what they want) for accurate production. The theory captures real truths: children clearly learn the specific language of their environment, accents and vocabulary are plainly imitated, and interaction and feedback matter. But it faces powerful objections - the creativity of child language (virtuous errors and overextensions that were never modelled), the speed of acquisition, and evidence that caregivers correct truth and meaning far more than grammar yet children still acquire grammar.

The nativist account, associated with Noam Chomsky, argues that the human capacity for language is innate. Because the input children receive is finite and full of performance errors yet they acquire an infinitely productive grammar - the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument - Chomsky proposed an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and a Universal Grammar underlying all languages. Evidence marshalled for nativism includes the systematicity and universality of the stages, virtuous errors and the wug test (rule-formation, not imitation), and the existence of a critical period. Criticisms include the difficulty of specifying the LAD, and the theory's relative neglect of the role of interaction and meaning - it explains structure better than use.

Two further approaches stress different factors. The cognitive account, associated with Jean Piaget, holds that language development depends on and follows general cognitive development: children can only encode linguistically what they can first understand conceptually (object permanence must precede talk about absent things). It usefully links language to thought but struggles to explain children whose language outstrips their cognition. The social-interactionist account, associated with Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner, argues that language is acquired through social interaction: Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and the more knowledgeable other, and Bruner's Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) and scaffolding, emphasise the caregiver's active role. The importance of child-directed speech and the finding that interaction (not mere exposure, as passive television watching shows) is necessary support this view.

The mature position is not to choose one theory but to evaluate them against specific data and against each other, recognising that each explains part of the picture: behaviourism explains the acquisition of the particular language and its vocabulary and accent; nativism explains the rule-governed creativity and universal sequence; cognitivism links language to conceptual development; interactionism explains the role of caregivers and the social drive to communicate. The best essays match the theory to the evidence in front of them - a virtuous error is nativist evidence, a scaffolded exchange is interactionist evidence - and reach a judgement that nature and nurture are both necessary, an innate capacity realised through social interaction. This balanced, evidence-led evaluation is what the top mark bands reward.

Worked example

Model evaluation paragraph plan

Plan how to evaluate the claim that language is learned by imitation, using a transcript containing a virtuous error and a scaffolded exchange.

Concede the behaviourist point
Acknowledge imitation's real role: the child's vocabulary and accent plainly come from the environment, and the caregiver's feedback supports learning - so behaviourism explains part of the data.
Turn the virtuous error against it
But the transcript's 'goed' was never modelled by any adult, so it cannot be imitation; it shows rule-formation - evidence for Chomsky's innate rule-governed capacity.
Bring in interaction
The scaffolded exchange (caregiver expanding the child's utterance) shows Bruner's LASS at work - development driven by supported interaction, not passive copying, and interaction is known to be necessary (mere TV exposure is insufficient).
Reach a judgement
Conclude that imitation is necessary but not sufficient: the particular language is learned from the environment, but the creative, rule-governed system is built by an innate capacity operating through social interaction.

Result: A top-band plan concedes imitation's role, uses the virtuous error as decisive counter-evidence for nativism and the scaffolded exchange for interactionism, and lands on the judgement that acquisition requires innate capacity realised through interaction - imitation alone cannot explain the data.

Typical mistakes

Describing the theories in turn without applying them to the data or evaluating them against each other - narration is not evaluation.
Presenting the debate as a simple win for one theory, rather than recognising that each explains different aspects of acquisition.

Active revision

'Children acquire language mainly by imitating the adults around them.' Evaluate this idea, using child-language data to weigh the behaviourist account against the nativist and interactionist alternatives.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for English language (Department for Education)

Reading and writing development#

AdvancedAQA 7702/1 Section B children's language developmentDfE GCE English Language subject content

Kroll's phases of writing development

Fig. 6Kroll's four phases of writing development, from mastering the physical basics to an integrated, purpose-controlled personal style.

Literacy is acquired later and less automatically than speech, because reading and writing are cultural technologies that must be taught rather than acquired simply through exposure. Reading development is often described in stages: children move from an early logographic phase (recognising whole words and environmental print by shape and context, such as a familiar logo), through an alphabetic phase (decoding words by mapping graphemes to phonemes - the basis of synthetic phonics), to an orthographic phase (recognising larger units, spelling patterns and whole words rapidly and automatically). Jeanne Chall's influential model describes a progression from 'learning to read' in the early stages to 'reading to learn' once decoding becomes fluent, after which reading is used to acquire new knowledge.

Writing development involves several interacting skills: the physical act of forming letters, spelling, and the composition of meaning. Barry Kroll proposed four broad phases of writing development: preparation (mastering the physical and basic technical skills), consolidation (writing resembles speech - drawing on spoken vocabulary and structures, using 'and' as the main connective), differentiation (the child begins to grasp that writing differs from speech and to control genres and registers, aided by feedback), and integration (a personal 'voice' and controlled, flexible style emerge, with writing shaped consciously for purpose and audience). Katharine Perera and Joan Rothery also described the development of writing, Rothery categorising early writing into forms such as observation/comment, recount, report and narrative.

Spelling develops through recognisable stages that parallel the phonological insight children bring to the task. Early 'invented' or phonetic spelling represents words by their sounds ('woz' for 'was', 'nite' for 'night'), showing the child applying grapheme-phoneme knowledge logically; as children internalise the many irregularities of English orthography, spelling becomes conventional. Miscues in reading (errors that reveal the strategies a reader is using) and invented spellings in writing are therefore analytically valuable in the same way virtuous errors are in speech: they show the child's active, rule-based hypotheses about the writing system rather than mere failure.

Analysing written data means identifying the developmental phase (Kroll), the spelling strategies, the features carried over from speech (the tell-tale 'and then... and then...' of the consolidation phase), and the emerging control of genre and register. As with spoken data, the point is to interpret errors as evidence of systematic learning and to relate the development to teaching and to the child's spoken competence. Literacy development connects the topic back to mode (writing must be learned precisely because it is not speech), to the writing-skills topic (the same journey towards controlled, audience-aware writing continues into adulthood), and to the theory debate, since the need for explicit teaching in literacy contrasts instructively with the relative automaticity of speech acquisition.

Worked example

Analysing a child's writing sample

A six-year-old writes: 'wen i woz at the seesyd i sor a krab and then we had ise creem and then we went hom'. Analyse the development.

Identify the spelling strategy
Invented/phonetic spellings ('woz', 'seesyd', 'sor', 'krab', 'ise creem') map sounds to plausible graphemes - the child is applying grapheme-phoneme knowledge systematically, not spelling randomly.
Identify speech-like structure
The recount is chained with repeated 'and then', a hallmark of Kroll's consolidation phase in which writing draws directly on spoken structures and connectives.
Classify the writing
It is a personal recount (Rothery's recount category), sequencing real events chronologically in the first person.
Interpret developmentally
The child is in the consolidation phase: technically competent and phonetically logical, but not yet differentiating written from spoken register - a normal, systematic developmental point.

Result: The sample shows consolidation-phase writing: logical invented spellings applying grapheme-phoneme rules, and a speech-like recount chained with 'and then' - systematic developmental strategies, not random error, in a child who has not yet learned to make writing differ from speech.

Typical mistakes

Marking a child's writing simply as full of 'mistakes' rather than analysing invented spellings and speech-like structures as evidence of developmental strategies.
Conflating reading and writing development, or assuming literacy develops as automatically as speech - it does not, because it must be taught.

Active revision

Analyse a sample of a young child's writing, identifying the developmental phase, the spelling strategies and any features carried over from speech, and explain what they show about the child's grasp of written language.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: AQA AS and A-level English Language (7702) specification (AQA)

Key points

Analysing phonological simplification

Key points

Analysing overextension

Key points

Interpreting overgeneralisation

Key points

Labelling functions in a transcript

Key points

Model evaluation paragraph plan

Key points

Analysing a child's writing sample

Sources

Children's language development

Key points

Analysing phonological simplification

Key points

Analysing overextension

Key points

Interpreting overgeneralisation

Key points

Labelling functions in a transcript

Key points

Model evaluation paragraph plan

Key points

Analysing a child's writing sample

Sources