How do children learn to speak from babbling to full sentences?
Spoken language development: the stages of phonological, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic development from babbling through holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic stages.
A focused answer to the AQA A-Level English Language child language topic, covering the phonological, lexical, grammatical and pragmatic stages of spoken development from babbling through the holophrastic, two-word and telegraphic stages, with terms like overextension and virtuous errors.
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What this topic is asking
AQA wants you to describe how children's spoken language develops through recognised stages at each language level (phonology, lexis, grammar and pragmatics) and to use accurate terminology to analyse child speech data. The skill being tested is not memorising a timeline but reading a transcript and saying what stage a child has reached, why, and what theory the evidence supports.
Phonological development: from babbling to speech sounds
These processes are systematic, not random. A child who says "tat" for "cat" is reliably substituting the easier alveolar /t/ for the velar /k/, which shows the child is operating a rule-governed sound system, not failing to copy. Babbling also shows the influence of the ambient language: by around ten months the sounds drift towards those of the home language, evidence that input shapes the innate capacity.
Lexical development: building a vocabulary
Overextension is often categorical (grouping by a shared feature such as four legs) and tells you the child is forming categories, an active cognitive process. Early vocabulary is dominated by concrete, here-and-now nouns because, as Piaget's cognitivism predicts, children name what they can see and act on before they handle abstractions.
Grammatical and pragmatic development
Pragmatic development runs alongside the grammatical stages: children learn to take turns, make requests, use words to direct attention, and adjust speech to listeners. Halliday's functions of language (such as the instrumental "I want" function and the interactional "me and you" function) are a useful frame for describing what a child's utterances are doing socially, not just how they are built. The recognised order of acquisition and the patterned nature of errors are the key pieces of evidence used in the theory debate.
Try this
- Take a short child transcript and label one phonological simplification process and the stage of grammar shown.
- Find an example of overextension and explain the shared feature the child is generalising on.
- Use one Halliday function to describe what a child's single-word utterance is doing socially.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of AQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AQA 201820 marksAnalyse the language development shown in the transcript of a two-year-old child talking to her mother. In your answer, refer to the stages and features of children's spoken language and to relevant theory.Show worked answer →
A Paper 1 child language data response rewarding AO1 (terminology), AO2 (theory) and AO3 (analysis of the data in context). Do not narrate the transcript line by line. Organise the answer by language level.
Phonology: identify simplification processes such as deletion ("nana" for banana), substitution and reduplication, and place the child near the end of the babbling-to-words transition. Lexis: look for overextension (calling all four-legged animals "doggy"), the dominance of concrete content words, and holophrastic single words doing the work of whole utterances. Grammar: spot the two-word stage and any telegraphic strings (content words, missing determiners and inflections) and any virtuous errors. Pragmatics: comment on turn-taking and how the mother's child-directed speech scaffolds the exchange.
Link to theory throughout: virtuous errors support nativism, while the mother's expansions and recasts support interactionism. Markers reward accurate stage labels, well-chosen quoted evidence and a theoretical frame, not a retelling.
AQA 202220 marksExplain how children's grammatical development progresses from the two-word stage to the post-telegraphic stage. Refer to relevant features and examples in your answer.Show worked answer →
A Paper 1 essay testing AO1 and AO2. Structure it as a clear developmental sequence with named features at each stage.
Two-word stage (around 18 months): meaning carried by word order and context ("daddy go"), with no inflections. Telegraphic stage: three- and four-word utterances of mainly content words, omitting function words, auxiliaries and determiners ("mummy push car"). Post-telegraphic stage: function words, inflections, auxiliary verbs and more complex clauses appear, and virtuous errors ("goed", "mouses") emerge as the child over-applies newly learned rules.
Use the errors as evidence: over-regularisation shows active rule-building, which supports the nativist and cognitivist views over pure imitation. Markers reward correct stage order, precise examples, and the link from feature to theory.
Related dot points
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Sources & how we know this
- AQA A-level English Language (7702) specification — AQA (2015)