For many years, psychologists have debated the existence of a critical period for language learning. The first three years of life seem to be the optimal time to attain native fluency.
Language development progresses through a series of stages.
Before infants can start to acquire vocabulary or syntax, they have to learn to segment the continuous streams of speech they hear into units. They then have to learn to classify words into syntactic categories.
Babies' first recognisable speech sounds occur as babbling in the first year. Sometime in the second year they begin to speak in one-word utterances. Young children use telegraphic speech, leaving out all but the essential words. By age four, most of the sentences children produce are grammatical.
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