As mentioned earlier, in the first years of life a child goes through three stages of language acquisition.

First stage. The preparatory stage is preverbal development of communication.

The stage covers the first year of children's lives. It is of extreme importance in the genesis of the child’s verbal function. Research carried out in the laboratory of psychology of early and preschool children at the Research Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR found that during the first year a child changes at least two forms of communication with surrounding adults:

• · Situational and personal communication with close adults (develops by the second month). It is characterized by the following features: 1) communication is in the position of the leading activity of children, mediating all their other relationships with the world; 2) the content of children’s need for communication comes down to the need for the friendly attention of adults; 3) the leading motive among communication motives is the personal motive; 4) the main means of communication with other people for infants is the category of expressive (expressive-facial) movements and poses.
• · Situational business communication (develops at the end of the first half of the year, when the child masters grasping). It is characterized by: 1) communication unfolds against the background of objective manipulations that constitute a new type of activity for the child, which takes the leading position; 2) the content of children’s need for communication is enriched with a new component - the child’s desire for cooperation, for joint action with surrounding adults; this component does not cancel the previous need of children for the benevolent attention of adults, but is combined with it; 3) the leading motive among communication motives is the business motive, since children, prompted by the practical tasks of manipulative activity, are now looking for contacts with adults; 4) the main means of communication with surrounding people for infants is the category of figurative (object-active) movements and postures - objective actions transformed to function as communicative signals.

Since the emotional and first simple practical contacts that occur between children and adults within the framework of the first two forms of communication do not require the child to master speech, he does not master it.

However, verbal influences make up a large and significant part of an adult’s behavior towards a child. Therefore, it is fair to assume that infants develop a special relationship to sounds early on.

speech due to their inextricable connection with the figure of an adult, who constitutes for the child the center of the world at the stage of situational-personal communication and a very important part of it at the stage of situational-business communication.

We can say that in the first year of life, children exhibit so-called vocal communication - a set of verbal influences of adults in relation to the child and him, the child, pre-speech vocalizations (screams, squeals, complexes of various sounds).

There is an assumption that even in the preverbal period, the child develops a special attitude towards the sounds of speech of surrounding adults. The attitude is characterized by the predominant selection of speech sounds among other - non-speech - sounds and an increased emotional coloring of the perception of the first.

Thus, already in the first months of life, children begin to identify and record the speech influences of the people around them among sound stimuli. It can be assumed that a selective attitude towards the sounds of words in comparison with sounds from physical objects constitutes the first, initial level of selectivity of speech hearing in children.

By the end of the first year, children experience a deepening of the analysis of the speech sounds themselves: two different parameters are distinguished - timbre and tonal.

For speech sounds, the main constituents and constants are specific timbres. Speech hearing is a timbre-based hearing.

In the second half of the year, the child moves on to more complex interaction with adults, during which the child develops a need for new means of communication to achieve mutual understanding with the adult. Speech becomes such a means, initially passive (understanding), and then active (initiative statements of the child himself).

Second phase. Stage of speech emergence.

The second stage serves as a transitional stage between two eras in the child’s communication with people around him - preverbal and verbal. This stage covers the period from the end of the first year to the second half of the second year. In the case of delayed speech development, it can last for a year or a year and a half.

The main events occurring at the second stage are the emergence of understanding of the speech of surrounding adults and the appearance of the first verbalizations. Both events are closely related to each other, and not only in time, but also in essence. They represent a two-pronged way of solving one communicative problem. The adult sets the task for the child - he requires the children to perform an action according to verbal instructions and in some cases provides for not only locomotor or object action, but also verbal action. If an adult does not provide for a verbal response and does not insist on it, then in children a gap forms between the level of development of passive and active speech with a lag in the latter. Both the understanding of an adult’s speech and the verbal response to it are carried out on the basis of active perception of the statement and its pronunciation. In this case, pronunciation acts both as a perceptual action, modeling specific speech timbres, and as a way of arbitrary articulation of the spoken word.

The concept of a communicative speech task does not imply a clear awareness by the individual of the requirements facing him or their verbal formulation. The term task denotes a problem situation objectively facing an individual, which has a motivating force for the subject, but is conscious or verbally formulated by him in a variety of forms, or is not even realized at all.

A mandatory component of such an understanding of the task is the recognition of its motivating effect on the individual. An example of such a task, as a rule, is the situation of individual interaction between an adult and a child. Using simple methods, an adult attracts the child’s attention to an object, for which he points to the object, performs certain manipulations with it, hands it to the child, immerses himself in examining the object, etc. At the same time, the adult pronounces a word denoting an object and repeats this word repeatedly.

Thus, the child is presented with two main elements of the task: the object and its verbal designation - in connection with each other. In addition, the adult creates a practical need for the child to internalize this connection and learn to actualize it. For this purpose, the adult either asks the child to name the indicated object, or names it himself and waits to see if the child finds the desired object among a group of others. The child’s successful action is rewarded by giving him an object for the game, which sometimes includes an adult.

This situation exactly reproduces the situation of developing conditioned reflexes from the category of so-called voluntary movements, described by Pavlov. It is not surprising, therefore, that the decisive condition for success is the level of need that motivates the child to do the enormous nervous work necessary to close the nervous connection.

For children acquiring speech, the situation is immeasurably more complicated. It can be assumed that children’s assimilation of passive speech and their utterance of the first active words depends to a decisive extent on the communicative factor. Since by the end of the 1st year the child has already mastered two forms of communication and has accumulated a relatively rich experience of interacting with various people, this communicative factor should be a rather complex formation in which three sides can be distinguished, each of which is the result of what has been established over many months contacts of the child with surrounding adults: a) emotional contacts, b) contacts during joint actions and c) vocal contacts.

Emotional contacts. Many early childhood researchers point to delays in the speech development of a child growing up in conditions of hospitalization or spending a significant part of his time in a children's institution, where much attention is paid to the physical care of children, where there are many toys and many talking adults serving the child, but the child lacks close, personal contacts.

It is suggested that children who lack personal, emotionally charged contact when communicating with adults experience a lag in speech development. The same thing happens when there are any defects in this contact.

By two months, the emotional connection between an adult and a child develops into complex activities, the main content of which is the exchange of expressions of mutual pleasure and interest. The importance of emotional contacts remains at all levels of the form of situational business communication.

It can be assumed that in the presence of a person to whom the child feels affection and affection, children will feel more at ease, will become free to navigate their surroundings, will be able to promptly switch attention from one element of the situation to another, and therefore will be more likely to be able to connect the type of object and its the name is as required by the task put forward by the adult.

Further, the experience of a close relationship with an adult helps the child quickly identify a communicative speech task and find means to solve it. Children look more boldly into the face of a close adult, are more likely to detect the movement of a person’s lips when he articulates a word, and more quickly adopt this movement by examining and feeling with his hand. Facts of this kind make it possible to imagine the ways in which emotional contact with adults influences the formation of visual-auditory connections in children. Affective disposition toward adults enhances young children's tendency to imitate. It is logical to think that the same tendency may appear in relation to the movement of the speech organs. This means that articulating the name of an object will cause a child’s tendency to repeat the words spoken by adults and, therefore, will contribute to children’s acceptance of the communicative speech task and will give it an incentive effect.

Thus, it is natural to assume that emotional contacts with an adult can have a stimulating effect on the development of verbal function due to the fact that they make the child want to speak as an adult speaks. Added to this is the growing focus of the child’s orienting-exploratory activity on the speaking adult and the correlation of this with the objective elements of the situation.

Contacts during joint activities at the beginning of the stage of speech formation also constitute a significant part of the child’s social experience.

Practical cooperation with an adult in conditions where elders organize children’s activities, help carry them out and control the process of its implementation, leads to the child forming the position of a younger partner, guided by an adult. If the objective activity of children, starting from the second half of the year, is formed autonomously, without the participation of an adult, then in this case the activity of communication remains at a lower level and does not go beyond the limits of situational and personal communication.

In this case, a child who has no practical experience of cooperation with an adult knows how to manipulate objects and works well alone with toys, but if an adult approaches him, the child does not engage in joint activities, wanting only affection from the adult. Such a child quickly loses an object handed to him by an adult; he does not experience interest in toys in the presence of adults; Absorbed in the contemplation of an adult, the child often does not seem to see the object and can look “through” it at the person for a long time.

The most important significance of situational business communication lies in the fact that the child learns to perceive an adult as an older partner cooperating with him and does not so much seek his affection as naturally includes him as the most important component in the problematic situation in which he himself finds himself. Further, his attention is focused precisely on the actions of the adult - on his manipulations with the object and on his articulation of the name of the toy. And finally, the child tends to associate the encouragement of an adult with his own actions; he seeks approval of his attempts and is therefore able to quickly discard incorrect acts (for example, shouting to give him an object or stubborn attempts to silently reach for an object) and consolidate acts leading to the goal ( studying the articulatory movements of an adult, attempts to actively repeat a word spoken by an adult).

Thus, we can say that the practical contacts of a child with an adult in the course of joint actions organize the child’s orientation, help him identify the key components of the situation and highlight the main points in the task set by the adult.

At the same time, the use of voice contacts also has a special meaning, separate from situational and personal communication in general. The fact is that the use of vocal sounds as communicative signals prepares the child for mastering speech, directing his attention to that, so to speak, matter in which the information sent to the partner can be clothed. If a child is not presented with vocal sound as a carrier of communicative information, he does not independently discover the possibilities that are hidden in this sound for communication activities.

It is known that if a child, due to special circumstances, finds himself outside the human environment and does not hear the speech of adults at an early age, he does not develop his own speech (“Mowgli children”). This connection is also evidenced by the development of deafness in normally hearing children raised by deaf-mute parents and isolated from the wider social environment. True, some experts emphasize the innate nature of the child’s ability to speak. But they also consider audible speech as sound material from which the child later constructs speech.

It is known that when the norm of audible speech falls below a certain limit, a state of speech sensory deprivation occurs, which inhibits the verbal development of children. These facts are observed in children raised in the first months of life in a closed children's institution. Many researchers believe that speech that is sonically monotonous, not colored with vivid emotions, and not directly addressed to the child also has a negative impact on verbal development. On this basis, the concept of a speech nutrient environment that is conducive to the development of speech in children is put forward. In such an environment, children develop a need to understand speech, without which the highest saturation of the child’s experience with verbal impressions turns out to be useless. On the contrary, children’s observation of speaking adults and adults’ close attention to children’s vocalizations, adults’ joy in response to the child’s vocal manifestations, and adults’ encouragement of each new vocal sound lead to the consolidation and progressive restructuring of pre-speech vocalizations with their gradual approach to the speech of surrounding adults.

The connection between pre-speech vocalizations and speech is indicated by a number of their features. Thus, according to careful research by R.V. Tonkova-Yampolskaya, pre-speech vocalizations are a way of modeling the intonation pattern of audible speech. Using electroacoustic methods, the presence of an intonation pattern was discovered already in the cry of a baby. Subsequently, along with the formation of vocal activity, the formation of intonation occurs: the older the child, the more complex intonations are contained in his vocalizations. V. Manova-Tomova showed that children model speech sounds presented to them for listening in special conditions in cases where in the surrounding conversational environment these sounds are rare or absent altogether.

It is important to note that during vocal communication, children develop sound complexes, which later begin to be used by the child as their first words. These are babbling formations such as “ma-ma”, “pa-pa”, “dya-dya”, “na”, etc. Adults readily pick up these babbling formations, repeatedly return them to the child (“Say: ma-ma”) and thereby record them in the repertoire of children’s vocalizations. Adults consciously associate individual sound complexes of children with objects or actions (“That’s right, it’s dad!”), thereby facilitating children’s assimilation of the nominative function of speech. Consequently, adults constantly process the vocal production of children, which undoubtedly favors the development of speech in the child.

Thus, a child’s vocal contacts with adults can have a positive effect on the development of verbal function due to the fact that they direct children’s attention to that sound matter, which then becomes a carrier of information transmitted from one partner to another. At the same time, babbling vocalizations provide children with the first ready-made form to fill with conceptual content, displacing the purely expressive load that these vocalizations had before. However, it can also be assumed that the speech influences of adults heard by children can have a positive effect on the development of verbal function in children only if these influences are included in the process of communication between the child and an adult, so that understanding the speech of surrounding people and constructing one’s own active utterance becomes important importance for the child’s contacts with adults.

Third stage. Stage of development of speech communication.

The third stage of development of speech communication covers the period from the appearance of the first words to the end of preschool age. During this time, the child, having traveled a long way, gradually masters the word and learns to use it for communication.

There are two main lines along which verbal communication develops in early and preschool age: firstly, a change in the content of communication and the development of the corresponding functions of speech as a means of communication; secondly, mastering voluntary regulation by speech means.

Research indicates a change in three forms of communication during the third stage. The first of them is situational business communication, which we already mentioned earlier. True, in children older than l 1/2 -2 years, this form of communication changes significantly: it ceases to be preverbal and now occurs using speech. However, maintaining the same content of the need for communication (this is the need for cooperation with an adult) and the leading motive (this motive remains business) leaves an imprint on the speech serving this activity. In the first time after its emergence, speech, like other means of communication, remains situational: the child denotes with a word the elements of a given visual situation (objects, actions with them), the word becomes a kind of conventional vocal indicating gesture. The child catches the adult’s demand, understands that something should be said, but initially does not pay attention to what exactly he needs to articulate. Therefore, the child says either a word that he has already learned earlier, or some syllable and even a sound that has received the approval of an adult. Here the situational nature of the first words in the mouth of a child, their gestural (indicative) nature and convention are revealed in their naked form.

Only very gradually the underwater part of the word is filled with conceptual content and opens up the opportunity for children to break the bonds of one particular situation and enter the space of broad cognitive activity. The appearance in children of the first questions about the hidden properties of things, as well as about objects and phenomena that are absent at a given time or place (not sensually presented), marks the child’s transition from early situational forms of communication to more developed extra-situational forms.

The first of them, and the third in the general genetic order, is the form of extra-situational cognitive communication. The main parameters of extra-situational cognitive communication are as follows: 1) within the framework of this form, contacts of children with adults are associated with their cognition and active analysis of objects and phenomena of the physical world, or the “world of objects”, in the terminology of D.B. Elkonina; 2) the content of children’s need for communication is their need for the respectful attitude of an adult; 3) among the various motives of communication, the leading position is occupied by cognitive ones, embodied for the child in the erudition and awareness of an adult; 4) the main means of communication here is speech, since only the word allows children to overcome the framework of a private situation and go beyond the immediate time and place.

Satisfying children's cognitive interests leads to a deepening of their acquaintance with the environment and to the involvement of the world of people - objects and processes of the social world - in the sphere of their attention. At the same time, the form of children’s communication is also restructured - it becomes non-situational and personal. Its distinctive features: 1) extra-situational personal communication takes place against the background of play as a leading activity, but often takes the form of separate, independent episodes; 2) the content of children’s need for communication is their need for mutual understanding and empathy from an adult, since the coincidence of the child’s opinions and assessments with the views of elders serves as a criterion for children for the correctness of these assessments; 3) among the motives of communication, the leading place is occupied by personal ones, personified in an adult as a subject who has his own special moral qualities, moral virtues, and a comprehensive rich individuality; 4) the main means of communication, as at the level of the third form, are speech operations. Thus, the first line of development of speech means of communication is expressed in the fact that these operations gradually lose their situational nature, are filled with truly conceptual content and give children the opportunity to go beyond the current situation into the wide world of things and people. It can be assumed that in this regard, preschoolers experience changes in the very matter of speech, the nature of the vocabulary used by children, the construction of sentences, and the general expressiveness of speech.

Mastery of voluntary regulation of speech activity. At an early age, it is not easy to get a child to pronounce even those words that he has mastered well. But gradually the difficulty with which children pronounce words passes, completely disappearing during school years.

At an early age, many factors inhibit a child’s speech, preventing it from being controlled by either an adult or, sometimes, even the child himself. Embarrassment at the sight of a stranger very often becomes one of the factors that inhibits children's speech. At the same time, the child becomes very timid, speaks in a whisper or is completely silent, and his speech is greatly impoverished.

This means that when talking with close adults, children are less situational, more trusting, and show more developed interests than when talking with strangers, when the child seems to go down one or two steps lower in all his manifestations.

However, with age, children increasingly master the voluntary regulation of speech, and this is an indispensable condition for their education in kindergarten and, in particular, their preparation for school.

Thus, the essence of the third stage is that children completely master the conceptual content of the word and learn, with its help, to convey to their partner all the more complex and abstract information in content. At the same time, the verbal function turns into an independent type of activity, since the child learns to regulate it voluntarily. Speech activity can then develop further in relative independence from the direct process of live communication between the child and a specific adult.

Mastering speech skills is a complex process that occurs differently for each child. It includes the formation of spoken language, understanding of spoken words, expression of one’s own thoughts, emotions, desires using language.

The correctness and success of mastering speech skills depends largely on the environment and the characteristics of upbringing in the family and educational institutions. Today we will talk about what stages of speech development exist, and also find out the normative deadlines corresponding to each age period.

The role of speech in the psychological development of a child is difficult to overestimate. This is why obvious speech disorders lead to a number of negative consequences:

• the baby’s development of cognitive processes slows down;
• character traits develop that interfere with communication with others (withdrawal, indecisiveness, low self-esteem);
• Difficulties arise in mastering school skills - writing and reading, which reduces children's academic performance.

To reduce the risk of such violations, it is important to know the sequence in which children learn the rules of their native language and the norms for the formation of speech skills.

Main stages of speech development

Russian psycholinguist and psychologist Alexey Leontiev identified several important periods of speech development through which every baby goes.

1. Preparatory stage lasts from birth to one year, divided into three periods:

• Crying is the only way a newborn can interact with the outside world and the first vocal reaction. With its help, the baby not only signals to his mother that he feels discomfort, but also trains breathing, voice and articulation;
• humming (up to 6 months) is the baby’s reproduction of certain sounds and their various variations: boo-oo-oo, a-gu, a-gy, etc. Psychologists call the baby during this period a musician who tunes his instrument. It is very important to support a child’s desire to communicate by speaking and repeating “what your child has said”;
• babbling (up to one year) is the final stage of preparing the baby for full speech. Now the baby begins to pronounce syllables, for example, “pa”, “ba”, which are associated with certain people. “Ma-ma,” says the child, addressing his mother.

Read also: The child does not speak at 3 years old. Causes and solutions to the problem

1. Pre-school stage begins with the appearance of the first words (usually from 12 months) and ends at the age of three.

Children's first words are of a generalized nature. For example, with the word “give” the baby denotes an object, his desires, and a request. That’s why only close people understand the baby and only in a specific situation.

From the age of one and a half, children learn to pronounce words in full, and not in a truncated form. The vocabulary continues to grow, the child puts together small sentences without prepositions: “Katya kitty” (Katya has a cat), “Katya am-am” (Katya wants to eat).

By the age of three, questions appear in children’s speech: “Where?”, “Where?”, “When?”. The baby begins to actively use prepositions, learns to coordinate words in number, case and gender.

1. Preschool stage Speech development lasts from three to seven years. At this time, the volume of active and passive vocabulary increases significantly. If children of the fourth year of life often use simple sentences in speech, then by the age of five they already communicate in complex and complex sentences. And by the end of the preschool stage, children usually pronounce sounds correctly, construct sentences correctly and have a broad outlook.

Speech development norms by age

Is everything okay? Many mothers ask this question, worrying that their babies speak few words, their speech is slurred, etc. We offer the boundaries of normal speech development, with the help of which you can monitor the development of language skills in your child.

At 6 months the baby:

• reproduces sounds with intonation;
• reacts to his own name (turns his head);
• is interested in sound sources, especially if they come from significant adults;
• reacts by crying or smiling to a friendly or angry tone.

At 12 months the baby:

• uses several simple words (or fragments thereof) in speech;
• follows simple instructions, especially if mom gestures to take or bring.

Read also: Speech development according to Maria Montessori's method

At 18 months children:

• have an active vocabulary of up to 20 words, mostly nouns;
• echolalia is often used in speech - repeating a heard phrase over and over again;
• show one of the body parts at the request of the parents (“Where is the nose?”);
• They speak “gibberish” in an emotional and slurred manner.

At 2 years old the child:

• names several familiar objects from his environment;
• composes the simplest sentences, most often consisting of verbs and nouns - “Kisya bites” (the cat eats);
• shows five parts of the body at mother’s request (“Where is your nose?”);
• can use up to 150-300 words in speech;
• knows and uses several pronouns – “mine”, “mine”, “mine”;
• skips a number of sounds - zh, sh, z, s, r, l, ts, shch (“mosno” instead of “possible”).

At 3 years old children:

• have an active vocabulary of 1000 words, usually verbs;
• begin to use plural nouns;
• know the main parts of the body and can show and name them;
• use conjunctions “if”, “when”, “because”;
• state their gender, name and age;
• understand short tales and poems told and read;
• understand simple questions and answer them more often in monosyllables.

At 4 years old kids:

• use up to 2000 words in speech;
• reduce, rearrange and omit words less;
• answer questions, retell well-known stories and fairy tales;
• sometimes hissing and whistling sounds are pronounced incorrectly;
• they ask a lot of questions - both simple and quite unexpected;
• They speak in compound and complex sentences - “I hit Vasya because he took the typewriter.”

At 5 years old a child:

• expands your vocabulary to 2500-3000 words;
• can make up a story based on a picture;
• applies generalizing concepts (flowers, wild animals, shoes, transport, etc.);
• uses all parts of speech in sentences - adjectives, pronouns, gerunds, interjections, etc.;
• speaks a language understandable to adults, although there are also errors in stress and declension of nouns;
• pronounces all sounds clearly, identifying vowels and consonants, hard and soft.

Language and speech are two aspects of speech activity, which includes two opposite processes - the process of generating speech and the process of its perception.

Speech exists in two forms - oral and written. In this case, the oral form of speech is primary, the written form is secondary.

Oral speech is spoken loudly and perceived by ear, and written speech is speech encoded using graphic signs and perceived through the organs of vision.

Oral speech has means of sound expressiveness: intonation, tempo, strength and timbre of sound, pauses and logical stress.

In modern society, the role of written speech is increasing and its influence on oral speech is increasing; Versions of oral speech based on written language are rapidly developing: reports; speeches, television and radio broadcasts.

Oral speech includes such types of speech activity (types of speech) as speaking and listening.

Written speech includes types of speech activities such as writing and reading.

Stages of speech production

Speech is the activity of using language for the purpose of communication.

It is customary to distinguish four stages of any activity:

• 1) the stage of orientation in the conditions of activity;
• 2) the stage of developing an action plan in accordance with the results of the orientation;
• 3) the stage of implementation of this plan;
• 4) control stage.

Let's consider the structure of a speech act.

1. Orientation stage. A speech act is possible only when a speech situation, a situation of communication, has taken shape or has been specially created. Speech situations can be natural, which develop as a result of communication between people, and artificial, which are created specifically for the purposes of training and speech development.

The teacher’s task is to create speech situations in the lesson that would have great developmental potential and would generate a motive for speech in students.

Speech, being a means of thinking, has a decisive influence on overall development and at the same time depends on this development.

• 2. Planning stage. At this stage it happens topic definition statements and main idea. In addition, the plan of the utterance as a whole, its structure, and composition are determined.
• 3. Statement implementation stage. It consists of two parts:
  • A) Lexical and grammatical structuring. This is the choice of words to express. Lexical structuring is carried out by first extracting parts of speech from the speaker’s memory, and then selecting thematic vocabulary within the parts of speech, i.e. words corresponding to the topic of this statement and the chosen style of speech. Grammatical construction is the arrangement of selected words in the desired sequence and their grammatical linking.
• 4. Control stage. The speaker evaluates the result of his speech, its effect.

Stages of a speech act

• 1. Orientation. Children should be taught how to navigate a communication situation, on the basis of which certain language means will then be selected.
• 2. Planning. Planning for future speech has always been given great importance. The ability to determine the topic, the main idea of ​​the text, are the main speech skills that are formed in the process of learning the native language.
• 3. Implementation.
• a) in the process of learning a language, the vocabulary and grammatical structure of students’ speech should be enriched.
• b) children should be taught the norms of oral and written speech, paying special attention to spelling, spelling, teaching intonation and means of expression.
• 4. Control. At school, it is important to work to prevent and eliminate speech errors and purposefully develop the skills of conscious reading and understanding of texts.

Stages of speech development in ontogenesis.

In speech therapy, the term “speech ontogenesis” is usually used to designate the entire period of human speech formation, from his first speech acts to that perfect state in which the native language becomes a full-fledged instrument of communication and thinking.

Let us consider the term “ontogenesis” much narrower, namely:

– to designate that period of dynamic development of children’s speech, which begins with the appearance of the child’s first words and continues until the formation of developed phrasal speech;

– to study those data about the disturbed and normal process of children’s acquisition of their native language, which are necessary for building correctional education: initial vocabulary, violations of the syllabic structure of words, agrammatism, violations of sound pronunciation and some others.

Knowledge of the patterns of speech development is necessary for timely and correct diagnosis of deviations in this process, for the competent construction of correctional and educational work to overcome speech pathology.

Researchers identify a different number of stages in the development of children's speech, calling them differently and indicating different age boundaries for each. For example, A.N. Gvozdev traces the sequence of appearance in speech of various parts of speech, phrases, and different types of sentences and, on this basis, identifies a number of stages.

A. N. Leontyev establishes four stages in the development of children’s speech:

1st - preparatory - up to one year;

2nd - pre-preschool stage of initial language acquisition - up to 3 years;

3rd - preschool - up to 7 years;

4th - school.

Let us dwell in detail on the characteristics of these stages.

The first stage is preparatory (from the moment the child is born to one year).

At this time, preparation for mastering speech occurs. From the moment of birth, the child develops vocal reactions: screaming and crying, which contribute to the development of subtle and varied movements of the three parts of the speech apparatus: respiratory, vocal, articulatory.

After two weeks, you can already notice that the child begins to respond to the speaker’s voice: he stops crying, listens when he is addressed. By the end of the first month, he can already be calmed down with a melodic song (lullaby). Next, he begins to turn his head towards the speaker or follow him with his eyes. Soon the baby already reacts to the intonation: to the affectionate one he perks up, to the harsh one he cries.

About 2 months humming appears and by the beginning of the 3rd month. - babble (agu-huh, cha-cha, ba-ba, etc.). Babbling is a combination of sounds that are vaguely articulated.

From 5 months the child hears sounds, sees articulatory movements of the lips of others and tries to imitate. Repeated repetition of a specific movement leads to consolidation of a motor skill.

From 6 months The child pronounces individual syllables by imitation (ma-ma-ma, ba-ba-ba, cha-cha-cha, pa-pa-pa, etc.).

Subsequently, through imitation, the child gradually adopts all the elements of spoken speech: not only phonemes, but also tone, tempo, rhythm, melody, intonation.

In the second half of the year, the baby perceives certain sound combinations and associates them with objects or actions (tick-tock, give-give, bang). But at this time he still reacts to the entire complex of influences: the situation, intonation and words. All this helps the formation of temporary connections (memorizing words and reacting to them).

At the age of 7 - 9 months. the child begins to repeat more and more diverse combinations of sounds after the adult.

From 10 - 11 months. reactions to the words themselves appear (regardless of the situation and intonation of the speaker).

At this time, the conditions in which the child’s speech is formed (correct speech of others, imitation of adults, etc.) become especially important.

By the end of the first year of life, the first words appear.

The second stage is pre-preschool (from one year to 3 years).

With the appearance of the child’s first words, the preparatory stage ends and the stage of development of active speech begins. At this time, the child develops special attention to the articulation of those around him. He very much and willingly repeats after the speaker and pronounces the words himself. At the same time, the baby confuses sounds, rearranges them, distorts them, and omits them.

The child’s first words are of a generalized semantic nature. With the same word or sound combination it can denote an object, a request, or feelings. For example, the word porridge can mean porridge at different times; give me some porridge; hot porridge. It is possible to understand a child only in a situation in which or about which his communication with an adult takes place. Therefore, such speech is called situational. The child accompanies situational speech with gestures and facial expressions.

From the age of one and a half years, the word acquires a generalized character. It becomes possible to understand an adult’s verbal explanation, assimilate knowledge, and accumulate new words.

During the 2nd and 3rd years of life, the child experiences a significant accumulation of vocabulary.

Let us present the most common data on the rapid development of children's vocabulary in the preschool period: by 1 year 6 months. - 10 - 15 words; by the end of the 2nd year - 300 words (in 6 months about 300 words!); by 3 years - about 1000 words (i.e. about 700 words per year!).

The meanings of words become more and more defined.

By the beginning of the 3rd year of life, the grammatical structure of speech begins to form in the child.

First, the child expresses his desires and requests in one word. Then - in primitive phrases without agreement (“Mom, give Tata something to drink” - Mom, let Tata drink some milk). Next, elements of coordination and subordination of words in the sentence gradually appear.

By the age of 2, children practically master the skills of using singular and plural forms of nouns, tense and person of verbs, and use some case endings.

At this time, understanding an adult’s speech significantly exceeds pronunciation capabilities.

The third stage is preschool (from 3 to 7 years).

At the preschool stage, most children still have incorrect sound pronunciation. You can detect defects in the pronunciation of whistling, hissing, sonorant sounds r and l, and less often - defects in softening, voicing and iotation.

Over the period from 3 to 7 years, the child increasingly develops the skill of auditory control over his own pronunciation, the ability to correct it in some possible cases. In other words, phonemic perception is formed.

During this period, the rapid increase in vocabulary continues. By the age of 4–6 years, a child’s active vocabulary reaches 3000–4000 words. The meanings of words are further clarified and enriched in many ways. But often children still misunderstand or use words, for example, by analogy with the purpose of objects, they say “pour” instead of watering from a watering can, “dig” instead of a shovel, etc. At the same time, this phenomenon indicates a “sense of language.” This means that the child’s experience of verbal communication grows and on its basis a sense of language and the ability to create words are formed.

In parallel with the development of vocabulary, the development of the grammatical structure of speech also occurs. During the preschool period, children master coherent speech. After three years, the content of the child’s speech becomes significantly more complex and its volume increases. This leads to more complex sentence structures. According to the definition of A.N. Gvozdev, by the age of 3, all basic grammatical categories are formed in children.

Children of the 4th year of life use simple and complex sentences in speech. The most common form of statements at this age is a simple common sentence (“I dressed the doll in such a beautiful dress”; “I will become a big strong uncle”).

At 5 years of age, children are relatively fluent in using the structure of compound and complex sentences (“Then, when we went home, they gave us gifts: various candies, apples, oranges”; “Some smart and cunning guy bought balloons, made candles, threw into the sky, and it turned out to be a fireworks display").

Starting at this age, children's statements resemble a short story. During conversations, their answers to questions include more and more sentences.

At the age of five, children, without additional questions, compose a retelling of a fairy tale (story) of 40 - 50 sentences, which indicates success in mastering one of the difficult types of speech - monologue speech.

During this period, phonemic perception improves significantly: first, the child begins to differentiate vowels and consonants, then soft and hard consonants, and finally, sonorant, hissing and whistling sounds.

By the age of 4, a child should normally differentiate all sounds, i.e. That is, he must have developed phonemic perception.

By this time, the formation of correct sound pronunciation ends and the child speaks completely clearly.

During the preschool period, contextual (abstract, generalized, devoid of visual support) speech is gradually formed. Contextual speech appears first when the child retells fairy tales and stories, then when describing some events from his personal experience, his own experiences, impressions.

The fourth stage is school (from 7 to 17 years).

The main feature of speech development in children at this stage, compared to the previous one, is its conscious assimilation. Children master sound analysis and learn grammatical rules for constructing statements.

The leading role here belongs to a new type of speech - written speech.

So, at school age, a purposeful restructuring of the child’s speech occurs - from the perception and discrimination of sounds to the conscious use of all linguistic means.

Of course, these stages cannot have strict, clear boundaries. Each of them smoothly transitions into the next.

In order for the process of speech development in children to proceed in a timely and correct manner, certain conditions are necessary. So, the child must:

· be mentally and somatically healthy;

· have normal mental abilities;

· have normal hearing and vision;

· have sufficient mental activity;

· have a need for verbal communication;

· have a full speech environment.

Speech mechanisms are the creative activity of the brain to create a speech utterance. So way, speech activity - This implementation of the language system in the process of forming an utterance. Naturally, this is something that can be characterized very schematically and conditionally, because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to penetrate the secrets of brain activity.

Schemes of the mechanism of speech were developed in the works of a number of major scientists -, etc. These schemes are different, but they all have a common basis - three-stage structure of generating a speech utterance.

First stage is psychological in nature and is associated with the motives of speech, its goals, speech intentions (speech intention), and with the conceptual and semantic content of speech.

Second phase associated with inner speech (the stage of verbal and grammatical formation of inner speech).

Third stage associated with external speech (the stage of implementing speech in oral or written form).

The speech mechanism must work without failures, automatically, and when characterizing the speech mechanism, not only the very fact of speech implementation is taken into account, but also the degree of its perfection. The mechanism of speech underlies speech action.

Speech action and its stages

Speech action (speech act)- statement, which depends on a specific life situation and pursues a specific goal; it has relative completeness.

Typically, statements have a small volume: this is a message about some facts, a question, a request, but in a broader sense, statements are also such units of speech activity as, for example, an article, an instruction, a book.

In addition to the three stages of speech action listed above (the generation of a speech utterance), the speech act includes two more stages - speech perception and feedback, i.e., the generation of a response utterance. This gives a complete, completed cycle of speech action.

I stage of speech activity - preparatory (speech-thinking). The main stages of preparing a speech act: speech situation, i.e. extralinguistic factors determine motives of speech And speech intention (intention) , which involve the speaker making a series of decisions regarding the future utterance.

Speech situation- this is the set of circumstances as a result of which a person has a need for speech action. Situations can be labor (arise in the process of collective work), domestic (household management, family, friendly communication), educational (artificially created situations are also used here), transport, shopping, etc.

As a result of this or that situation, certain motives of speech(the need to communicate something, ask about something, convince of something, etc.), speech intention (intention). The idea of ​​the utterance arises, a forecast is made regarding its possible results, the addressee of the speech is determined, those of its characteristics are realized that can influence the selection of means of expression (the age of the addressee, the level of his culture, etc.), the question of many parameters of the future utterance is resolved (loudly or quietly, with or without gestures; sometimes, if there is a choice, in what language, orally or in writing, etc.).

II stage of speech activity - structuring the statement. The main stages of structuring a statement: internal plan (programming), internal speech.

Programming can be of two types:

a) programming a specific statement;

b) programming the speech whole.

The first is carried out one statement in advance, the second - for a longer period. Thus, there is a distinction between “small program” and “large program”.

A small program is the unconscious construction of a certain scheme, on the basis of which a speech utterance is subsequently generated. It can be specific or generalized to varying degrees, and in real speech practice, unconscious, automatic planning and conscious planning are closely related, intertwined, interspersed. A large program, which concerns an entire work, of course, is of a different nature and is usually the result of the creative, sometimes very long, conscious work of the author.

Inner speech- semantic and grammatical formation of the statement. The study of this stage of speech action is naturally difficult to study, and therefore much here is at the level of hypotheses.

It has been established that inner speech includes three components: 1) choice of words, 2) arrangement of words, 3) linking words; but how exactly this is accomplished is viewed differently in science.

A very common theory of the generation of speech utterances is, for example, the theory according to which a person has long-term and short-term (operational) memory. In long-term memory, three zones are distinguished: in the first zone - words that are most easily reproduced, in the second - those that are more difficult to find, and in the third - the most forgotten words. The mechanism of preparation for a speech action is to find words that are adequate to the intent, regardless of the search time (you can also use books and notes for this). Short-term memory only lasts for a few seconds. During this time, you need to have time to choose some syntactic scheme and include words selected from long-term memory into it. Words in a Russian sentence are linked in pairs, so that a chain of syntactic dependencies is formed. Schemes (models) of syntactic dependencies are also stored in long-term memory. The essence of RAM comes down to two functions. Firstly, during the entire time of oral (i.e., on the go, so to speak) composing a proposal, you must hold words already spoken and, secondly, preempt words to be spoken. Retention and anticipation of words ensure their consistency in the syntactic scheme. The speaker sequentially retains and anticipates each pair (or several) syntactically related words, and at the same time retains the general meaning of the utterance.

Anticipation and retention are determined and ensured not only by grammatical dependencies, but also by the strength of keywords, which is associated with phrasal, logical stress, word order and partly the choice of construction.

Firstly, logical subjects and predicates are distinguished, and secondly, their characteristics. Associations play an important role when choosing words. It has been established, for example, that on average 8-9 native Russian speakers out of 10 respond to a request to name a poet Pushkin, and when asked to name the fruit they answer apple. Naturally, if a person wants to move away from the pattern, he has to overcome the usual associative connections. But the question of where exactly the logical predicate is and how it relates to the members of the sentence is complex and is not solved unambiguously in science. In particular, there is an opinion that is expressed that logical emphasis is placed on the predicate. But logical stress, depending on the communicative purpose of the utterance, can be placed on any word, i.e. in the sentence “Is the book on the table? - the predicate can even be on the, if it is necessary to emphasize that the book, for example, is not under table One sentence has ended, the RAM resets the processed words and performs the task of composing a new sentence. Making decisions, selecting and replacing words on the fly, canceling and popping up sentence structures - all this happens instantly and is usually not noticed by introspection.

Thus, the utterance program is formed under the control of a “tracking device”, which ensures, on the one hand, the execution of a pre-created holistic program, and on the other hand, the introduction of constant corrections to this program, which carries out “constant monitoring of the flow of the emerging components of the utterance, and in the most difficult cases and conscious selection of the necessary speech components from many alternatives.” Inner speech itself has different phases. Its development proceeds from primary, poorly differentiated forms to “internal speaking”, or “internal monologues”, as the final phase of the development of internal speech during its transition to external speech. Internal speech at this phase is maximally developed and approaches in its structure to external speech.

III stage of speech activity - sound or graphic design of a statement, external speech.

For the communication process, this stage is the most important and most responsible, because it represents the materialization of the speech intention. This materialization is carried out on a phonological basis. A big role here is played by the quality of speech, which depends on many conditions (on the degree of clarity of pronunciation, on the degree of proficiency in spelling or spelling norms, etc.). And the quality of speech, in turn, largely determines the perception of speech and the reaction to it, i.e. feedback.

Speech perception (listening and reading) . Speech perception is a process reverse to the process of speech generation, but there is no complete coincidence of these stages and stages of speech generation and perception. Speech perception is carried out according to its own laws. There are a number of theories on this matter. One of them is that the listener, when perceiving speech, is guided by three types of rules - grammatical, semantic and pragmatic. In order to “understand a spoken sentence, it is necessary to process the received acoustic signal in accordance with these linguistic rules. Linguistic rules usually serve to limit the number of alternatives from which the hearer can choose.

The listener operates with syntactically complete units; in order to highlight them, he must perform a syntactic analysis, that is, apply grammatical rules. Then semantic rules are applied (this further reduces the number of alternatives), as a result of which the meaning of words, grammatical forms, etc. is realized, and the understanding of the statement as a whole does not always reach 100%. Finally, the number of possible alternatives is reduced through the application of pragmatic rules, which primarily concern non-linguistic information (situation, general experience of speakers, etc.). This model of perception is called “analysis through synthesis” and well explains the active nature of the process of speech perception.

In oral speech Feedback (usually a response statement) is immediate in nature, and it is most fully realized in dialogue. In written speech, there is usually no direct communication between the writer and the reader (these are letters, reviews of scientific works, etc.), except for such cases as, say, the exchange of notes between people sitting close to each other.