1. Babbling
Crane, L. Ben et. al (1981: 164) state that before infants start speaking, from about the age of 6 month, they produce speech-like sounds that is known as “babbling” or “pre-language” state. Babbling consists of strings of sounds comprised of strings of vowels and consonants; it is more clearly more language-like than other early vocalizations such “crying” and “cooing”. The sounds are usually produced with a great deal of repetition, such as “bababa”, “papapa”, “mamama”, “tatatata”, etc.
Oller in Harley (1995: 353) divided babbling into two types: “reduplicated babble”, and “non-reduplicated or variegated babble”. Reduplicated babble is characterized by repetition of consonant-vowel syllables, and often producing the same pair for a long time. The examples of this type of babbling are as follows: “bababa”, “tatata”, “dadada”. Non-reduplicated or variegated babbling is characterized by strings of non-repeated syllables, such as “bamido”.
2. One-word Stage (Holophrastic Stage)
Yasin (1991: 189) states that at the age of 18 months, children begin to produce their one-word utterances. The words that are produced by the children, at this stage, refer to the objects around them. By the time children have vocabularies of fifty words, and most of the children use some words for food, body parts, clothing, animals, household items, vehicles, and people.
At this stage, the words that most frequently occur are those as follows: “juice”, “milk”, and “cookie” for food; “ear”, “eye”, and “nose” for body parts; “shoe”, “hat”, and “shock” for clothing; “dog”, “cat”, and “duck” for animals; “clock”, and “light” for household items; “ball”, and “block” for toys; and “car”, “boat”, and “truck” for vehicles.
The early words produced by children, at this stage, may refer to different roles. They do not just refer to objects, but also may names roles. Greenfield and Smith in Harley (1995: 356) states that the early word “mama” might be used to refer to particular action carried out by the mother. Thus, children use words not just to name the objects, but also to pick out the roles that the objects play in certain event.
3. Two-word Stage
The process of combination of “one-word” into “two-word” utterances begins within a few months of children early “one-word” combination. Yasin (1991: 189) states that it begins when children are at the age of two years. At this stage, children begin to combine one-word into two-word utterances. The early two-word utterances produced by children are commonly said to be “telegraphic” in that they consist primarily of content words, with many function words absent. The words are arranged according to the case relation used in “verb-and-noun” combination and the pairs of cases used in “noun-and-noun” combination.
Bowerman in Clark and Clark (1977: 307) listed some examples of two-word utterances from a two-year girl called Kendall. In the “verb-and-objective” case combination and “locative-and-objective” combination, Kendall sometimes places the “objective” first, such as Kimmi kick (“kick Kimmi”), or Towel bed (“the towel is on the bed”), and sometimes second as in look Kendall (“look at Kendall”). However, in her “agentive-and-objective” case combinations, Kendall always places the “objective” case in the second position as in Kendall book (“Kendall is reading a book”).
4. Telegraphic Stage
The telegraphic stage is the last stage of language before a child can speak fluently and begins roughly around 2.5 years of age and onward indefinitely until a child has fluent language skills. Children at this stage progress very quickly and develop language at a much faster rate now that they have grasped the very essentials of language.
During this stage, children seem to have a much better understanding of syntax and semantics. Over the course of this stage (more specifically after the age of two), children often expand their lexicon by as many as ten to twelve new words a day, most of which are new social interaction words such as yes, no, please, by, etc. to discover these new words, many children at this age ask a large amount of questions typically beginning with 'wh', such as 'who, where, what' etc. and in a sentence they may look like 'Where Mummy? What that? etc'. They tend to develop a fairly good understand of what each individual word means and how to use it in a sentence. During this stage, children do not appear to be making word order errors, but their sentences are shortened dramatically. They generally follow the order of the subject, verb and object, such as 'doggie bark me' might mean 'the dog barked at me'. The first inflection children learn is usually 'ing', followed by an understanding of plurals and how plurals are formed as well as starting to develop exceptions. Simple prepositions (i.e. in, on, etc) are generally learnt after this.
