As 2 and 3 year old children learn language through sound, they may apply grammatical rules that they have "regularly" observed such as adding the sound "ed" to the end of a word to indicate past tense even beyond the ways they have heard before as in "We played house. We goed to the store." The majority of children around the world, but only 25% of those in the U.S., learn to communicate in two languages. Monolingual children are strongly influenced by the assumption that an object has only a single name, Infants are wired and innately ready to respond to the sounds of any language, called____, but between six and nine months they show an increasing preference for listening to their native language and their ability to distinguish sounds that are not in the language around them diminishes rapidly, such that 10 month olds are already similar to the adult speakers of the native language in terms of language sound recognition.
At about four to six months of age, infants begin making vocalizations thatinclude the sounds required for any language, including guttural sounds, clicks, consonants, and vowel sounds equipping the child with the ability to repeat whatever sounds are characteristic of the language heard. By about seven months, these sounds will no longer be used as the infant grows more accustomed to a particular language.
At around ten months of age, the infant can understand more than he or she can say, just as in the early stages of learning a second language when our___is greater than our productive language.
Baby talk is the special exaggerated sing-song intonation used by many adults when talking to infants.
Psychologists believe there is a time between infancy and puberty in which learning language can easily occur.