Phonological development

Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language (phonology) during their stages of growth.

Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units – in order to acquire words and sentences. One reason that speech segmentation is challenging is that unlike between printed words, no spaces occur between spoken words. Thus if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” they have to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.” Once "cup" is able to be extracted from the speech stream, the child has to assign a meaning to this word.^[1] Furthermore, the child has to be able to distinguish the sequence “cup” from “cub” in order to learn that these are two distinct words with different meanings. Finally, the child has to learn to produce these words. The acquisition of native language phonology begins in the womb^[2] and isn't completely adult-like until the teenage years. Perceptual abilities (such as being able to segment “thisisacup” into four individual word units) usually precede production and thus aid the development of speech production.