Language acquisition: basics and phases

Abstract

The acquisition of language is the most important stage in the development of the child. Everywhere in the world, any child learning to speak must build, during early childhood, his own knowledge of the language in order to be able to communicate. the study of the neural bases of these capacities shows us that the infant is an actor in his learning and that his cerebral organization allows him to go and seek in his environment the adequate input. the environment influences this acquisition during the critical phase of the development of language, Research conducted over the last thirty years has shown that the language spoken to children by adults is different from that used in adult communication at all levels of linguistic analysis: phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We adopt in this work a descriptive linguistic approach; we talk about the cerebral and cognitive bases of language acquisition and also the stages of acquisition of perception and production of language. We conclude that the communicative intention is present very early even in the pre-linguistic phase.