El auge de la ciudad

Yule (quoted in Vogel 2006:48) states that all children develop first language milestones at various stages at approximately the same time as a result of the interplay between biological maturation, the lateralisation process and socio-environmental factors. Yule (1996) described the following developmental phases of language acquisition:

2.6.3.1 The Prelinguistic Stage

The pre-linguistic stage ranges within the period of approximately 3-10 months and is characterised by three phases of sound production. At about 3 months, during the cooing phase, the baby makes recognisable sounds using velar (with tongue near soft palate) consonants such as k and g, as well as high vowels such as i and u. During the early babbling phase (about 6-8 months) babies produce a number of different vowel and consonant sounds such as fricatives

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and nasal sounds. They also produce syllable-like utterances such as ‘ga-ga-ga’ and ‘ba-ba-ba’. In the later babbling phase (about 9-10 months) there are recognisable intonation patterns to the consonant and vowel combinations being produced, with increasing variations and complexities in the sound sequences together with the increased usage of nasal sounds such as in ‘ma-ma-

da-ba-ga’ (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:48-49). Thus, during approximately the first year of life, the

infant develops the precursors for the language dimensions of form (phonology, morphology and syntax), semantics, and pragmatics (Paul 2009:101).

2.6.3.2 The Linguistic Stage

The linguistic stage starts with the one-word or holophrase stage, and falls within the range 12-18 months. Toddlers now begin to utter a repertoire of comprehensible single-unit phrases such as ‘cat’, ‘milk’, ‘bed’. These holophrastic utterances may only contain one word, but the word could stand for a phrase or a sentence. For example, the toddler may say ‘where?’ or ‘there’ (usually pronounced ‘dere’) to mean ‘Where is it?’ or ‘There it is’. The toddler can also associate words with objects, for example, by pointing to a bed and saying the name of the person who it belongs to even if the person is not in the bed (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:49).

The two-word stage, which begins from between 18-20 months, is characterised by the ability of the child to combine two words to convey his thoughts. The child’s vocabulary moves beyond 50 words, and the two-word combinations such as ‘baby chair’, or ‘mommy eat’ are used to communicate with adults who will interpret what the child intends to convey through such expressions. For example, the two-word phase ‘baby chair’ could mean that the chair belongs to the baby, or that the baby wants to be put into his chair, or that there is a baby sitting in the chair. The child produces speech (expressive language) and receives feedback (receptive language) from the adult confirming that communication is taking place. It was during this stage of first language acquisition that the research participant became deaf. By the age of two the child’s vocabulary has extended to between 200-400 distinct words and he is able to understand 5 times as many words (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:49).

During the stage of telegraphic speech (about 2-3 years) the child begins to use sequences of words (lexical morphemes) to produce phases and sentences that include simple prepositions to indicate place (in, on). For example ‘daddy in bed’, or ‘mommy go ta-ta’ indicates that the child has developed the capacity to build sentences using the correct word order. By the age of two- and-a-half the child’s lexical knowledge has expanded rapidly and by the age of three, the child’s level of speech faculty closely resembles that of an adult. However, a child does not acquire language simply by imitating adults; and a child is not simply an empty vessel (tabula rasa) into

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which one deposits words and phrases. Although much vocabulary is adopted from the speech he hears, the child is actively engaged in trying out and testing language constructions and creating unique, personally constructed expressions (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:50).

The use of phonology, morphology and syntax fall within the form dimensions of language development which is based on the grammatical structure of speech sounds according to a set of rules (Mercer, quoted in Dednam 2007:121). From about the age of two-and-a-half to three years the child moves beyond the telegraphic phases of using single or root morphemes, and begins to incorporate bound morphemes such as prefixes, suffixes (e.g. baby crying), and inflectional morphemes such as regular and irregular plurals to denote the grammatical functions of words and to indicate tenses. Although the child may, at first overgeneralise a plural marker (dogs, cats,

foots, feetses), and he may confuse his usage of the –ed inflection for a while, he is generally

able to use the various grammatical inflectional morphemes correctly by about the age of four or five (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:50).

The syntactic structures of language (the order of words in a sentence) develop over three stages. In stage 1 (18-26 months) the child will add interrogative words or the negative form with a rise in intonation to one or two-word phrases such as ‘’Where daddy go?’’, or ‘’not hungry’’. In stage 2 (22-30months), the interrogative and negative phrases become more complex as in, for example, ‘’Why you crying?’’, or ‘’He no hit you’’. Stage 3 (24-40 months) sees the development of questions and the forming of negatives that are quite close to the adult model as in, for example, ‘’Why doggie can’t sit here?’’, or ‘’he not eating it’’ (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:50). The language dimension of semantics (which involves the knowledge of word meanings and sentences or the vocabulary and contents of a given language), and the language dimension of function or pragmatics (which is the expression of emotions through intonations patterns, gestures and reactions) also develop during the stages of language acquisition. By the time a child is ready for school (over 5 years of age) he is au fait with the form of the language and is able to communicate using a substantial variety of complex language structures, much like that of an adult. During the school years it is mainly the dimension of semantics and the expansion of lexical knowledge that develop further (Yule, quoted in Vogel 2006:42,51).

Looking back at the stages of language acquisition postulated by Yule (1996), it must be borne in mind that the research participant, Sally, was 20 months of age when she lost her hearing faculty. The fitting of digital hearing aids at the age of 2 years and I month was largely unsuccessful and the first cochlear unit was implanted at the age of 4 years and 3 months. Essentially this means that Sally was hearing deprived and, therefore, language deprived during the most critical time for

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acquiring language. The telegraphic speech stage of rapid lexical development rooted in phonology and lexical morphology; the development of increasingly complex morphological and syntactic structures; and the expansion of the language dimensions of semantics and pragmatics, were all severely compromised because Sally was unable to listen and speak.

The Environmental, Cognitive and Social Models of language acquisition with their opposing philosophies, and the stages of language acquisition as illustrated by Yule (1996) all centre on acquiring language by listening and speaking during the critical pre-school years. Spoken language may be defined in terms of receptive and expressive components; sensory, cognitive, and motor elements; or in terms of language dimensions such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Hearing impacts directly on the receptive and sensory components of spoken language processing, as well as on acquiring the phonology of a language. However, the influence of hearing on the expressive, cognitive, and motor components of spoken language, which involves both speech reception and speech production, should not be underestimated (Blamey 2003:232).