REVISED JOURNAL ENTRY 3
THE AMAZING STAGES OF HOW CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGE
10 June 2025
Today, I’ve been thinking about how children learn their first language. It’s something I find genuinely fascinating, especially after working with people from so many different language backgrounds. Watching a child go from making basic sounds to speaking full sentences highlights just how remarkable human communication is.
Babbling and the universality of early sounds
What surprises me most is how natural this process is. Babies start babbling between 6 to 12 months, producing simple, repetitive sounds like "ma-ma", "pa-pa", "ba-ba" or "da-da" — regardless of what language their caregivers speak. This might explain why words for parents are so similar across cultures: mamãe and papai in Portuguese, mama in English, Spanish, and Italian, papa in French and Spanish, baba in Arabic and Mandarin. These are among the first sounds infants can articulate, so they naturally become associated with key figures like parents.
I've seen this up close. When I lived in Colombia, and through my Pakistani friends' children, I noticed how their babbling sounded almost identical at first, whether a child said "papá" in Spanish or "baba" in Urdu. Only later did they begin to reflect the specific phonological patterns of their home languages.
Phonological awareness and the Fis Phenomenon
In our last class, we split into groups and I suggested we discuss the Fis Phenomenon — one of the most fascinating aspects of early phonological development. It reveals how children can perceive the correct pronunciation of words before they’re able to produce them themselves. A child might say “fis” for “fish,” but still react when an adult incorrectly says “fis.” It’s an amazing example of their phonological awareness, even before full articulation is possible.
Critical Period Hypothesis and adult learners
As someone who teaches foreign languages to adults, whose "language acquisition window" may have partially closed, as the Critical Period Hypothesis suggests, I often observe the opposite problem. Many of my Portuguese-speaking students struggle not only to pronounce unfamiliar sounds in English, French, or Spanish, but even to hear the difference between their own pronunciation and the target one. This reminds me of how sensitive and “tuned in” children’s brains are to sound contrasts — a kind of auditory superpower we often lose with age.
Language as a human superpower
All of this makes me reflect on how our brains develop. Young children are like sponges — as we say in Brazil — absorbing language effortlessly and rapidly. They move through stages like the holophrastic stage (one-word utterances) and then the telegraphic stage, where they start stringing words together meaningfully, even if function words are missing.
To wrap up, I believe there’s something truly magical about how children acquire language — a process that is innate, but also deeply shaped by interaction, culture, and environment. They don’t need textbooks or formal lessons. Language just unfolds within them. Watching this process makes me admire the beauty of human communication — and wish we could somehow retain that same openness and curiosity as we grow older.
