Developmental Stages in Child Language Acquisition: A Case Study of Persian Consonants

This paper presents the results of a case study investigating the acquisition of Persian consonants by a female child during 6 to 20 months of age. The data obtained from spontaneous and elicited observations shows that the child's acquisition of consonants took place at four different stages:(1) Stage I (from her 6th month to her 10th month) when she started babbling, and produced her first utterances i.e /bʌbʌ/, /mʌmʌn/, /mʌdæ/. Four consonants /m/, /n/, /b/, /d/ were uttered. Towards the end of this stage, the nasals production was completed. (2) Stage II (from her 11th month to her 14th month); At this stage, sixteen other consonants appeared for the first time. At the end of this stage, the production of plosives, liquids, and roll was completed. Five fricatives /v/, /∫/, /s/, /x/, /z/, seven plosives /g/, /t/, /k/, /p/, /q/, /Ɂ/, /h/, two liquids /l/, /j/, one affricate /ʧ/, one roll /r/ were observed in Fateme’s utterances. (3) Stage III (from her 15th month to her 16th month); At this stage, at the end of the fifteenth month affricates emerged by production of /ʤ/ sound. From her 17th month to her 18th month, her performance deteriorated both in quality and quantity towards the end of this stage possibly due to some decline in her physical health. Then (4) Stage IV (from her 19th month to her 20th month); At this stage, the production process started again and had a progressive rate in which she produced all the consonants she could produce before with a high frequency in a lot more cases and the most similar articulatory position to that of adults.

کلیدواژه ها:

Child language acquisition ، Persian consonants ، Consonant production stages ، Frequency