Language development

One of the skills that makes us human is language, and it is surprising that children go from not having intentional communication to having the most complex system of representation that is human language in less than three years of life. What happens in these three years allows the child to appropriate a system that leads us to understand the world. In this sense, when babies are born, they already have abilities that will help them to take on the language of their environment. Around the first year they will say their first word, but much earlier they will understand many things and will be able to have communicative intent. From their first word, children will first acquire the language little by little, and from 18 months they will accelerate this acquisition (lexical explosion). At this moment they will begin to combine words with each other, initially telegraphically but increasingly close to adult sentences. At the age of 3-4 years, the basic structure of the language will be acquired, but many aspects of the language will continue to develop until adolescence, such as metalinguistics, and others, such as the lexicon, throughout life. In this topic we will explore this process and the processes and abilities that children put in place to appropriate language.