There are five components or stages of language. “During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures” (Evanson et al., 2023). This page will describe the five traditional elements as first identified by Bloom and Lahey in 1978. These elements or stages include phonological stages, morphological stages, syntactic stages, semantic stages, and pragmatic stages (Warni et al., 2023, para. 2). “As illustrated in the diagram below, these components are interrelated and essential for normal language development” (Lesson 2: The Five Elements of Language and How Language is Acquired, 2020, para.3).
Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sounds of language acquisition. “The stage of acquiring phonology is children include the stages of sound production by imitating the sounds heard in their environment, such as babbling” (Warni et al., 2023, para. 2). The phoneme is a discrete sound that makes up the words in the English language. There are 43 phonemes. Having phonemic awareness is to know that each word is comprised of a series of these discrete sounds. “Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that includes phonemic awareness, or words at the phoneme level” (Blevins, 2017, p. 47). Phonological awareness also includes syllables, rhyming units, words within sentences, and other features involving the sounds of words.
Children acquire language by interacting with their environment. They use imitation of sounds combined with their physical maturation to be able to form and repeat what they are hearing and the cognitive ability to make sense of what they hear as well as store this learned information where it can be retrieved, updated, and absorbed. Disordered phonemes, the inability to pronounce the sounds correctly as well as the addition of incorrect phonemes or the omission of phonemes can indicate a problem with phonology.
Morphology is the form component of language acquisition. ” Morphology refers to the study of word structure, including the analysis of prefixes, suffixes, roots, and other elements that make up words” (Bajrami & Iseni, 2023, para. 2). “The rules of morphology determine how phonemes combine to make the words of a language” (Lesson 2: The Five Elements of Language and How Language is Acquired, 2020, para.6). Children’s language skills improve as they learn the rules and patterns of speech. To do so, they must have the cognitive ability to form words and understand them in context.
Morphemes can be bound or unbound in nature which denotes their ability to stand alone. Morphemes are used to denote plurality in words and verb tense. The word ‘dog’ is a free or unbound morpheme. What makes ‘dog’ a free morpheme is that it cannot be divided into a smaller unit. It stands alone and conveys meaning. If we add an ‘s’ to dog, it’s meaning becomes more than one dog by the addition of the bound morpheme ‘s’. The ‘s’ cannot stand alone and convey meaning so it is a bound morpheme.
“Syntax is the study of the rules that govern how words are put together to make phrases and sentences” (Kuder, 2017, p. 14). As children grow and interact with their environment, social cues give sufficient impetus to learn the properties that give speech its meaning-making sense. It is the “social input as part of the ‘tuning’ process used by children to choose the right grammar from the ones that are available” (Kliesch, 2012, p. 91). Grammar, or the acquisition of syntax, is a cultural adaptation and growth within biological constraints (Kliesch, 2012). Should children appear to not understand how to put words together to make meaning, a disorder may be present.
A measurement referred to as the mean length of utterance (MLU) measures syntactic development. “MLU is a better indicator of language development and complexity than a child’s chronological age or the average number of words used in a sentence” (Language and Literacy in the School Years, 2020, para. 9). As children’s sentence construction gets longer, their MLU gets longer as well.
Semantics is about the organization and expression of the meanings of words. “Students reflect knowledge of semantics in vocabulary usage, word associations, and cognitive concepts” (Lesson 2: The Five Elements of Language and How Language is Acquired, 2020, para.8). “Linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speaker of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her” (Charles W. Kreidler, 1998 as quoted by Nordquist, 2020, para.3). Children who cannot order their sentences correctly may have deficits in this area.
Pragmatics is the study of natural language usage and “the relations between languages and their users” (Duignan, 2023, para.1). It manifests as a person’s ability to adjust communication to fit the age, social status, and/or literacy of the target audience. “A student with a disorder in the pragmatics area has an incorrect understanding of the social rules of language” (Lesson 2: The Five Elements of Language and How Language is Acquired, 2020, para.9).
