Appearance/ Production of Language
The holophrastic stage endures for a certain period of time, as the child gradually boost his vocabulary by adding new words to it. Actually, the child's vocabulary at this stage develops at a slow pace and includes various types of words, but does not contain any grammatical words such as prepositions, definite and indefinite articles and grammatical endings such as past tense or plural forms.
The One –Word Stage/ Holophrastic Stage
During The holophrastic stage children begin recognizing that sounds are associated with meanings. This phenomenon can be noticed shortly before their first birthday (between 10-12 months) as they start producing noticeable single words, understanding their meanings and then try to join them together. Thus, when the child is able to use some words of the parent‟s language we can say that he is able to speak. In this respect, Tincoff and Jusczyk (1999) cited in Levin and Munsch (2010: 308) assert that:
Through their interactions with caregivers, infants begin to associate words with familiar objects and people. When infants as young as 6 months were shown side-by-side videos of their mother and their father but heard either the word mommy or the word daddy, they spent more time looking at the parent who was being named.
The words used at the one words stage have peculiar and diverse pronunciations since children have the tendency to cut out the difficult parts of the word to be pronounced. For instance the word „string‟ is pronounced „sring‟ and „sr‟ is a cluster that does not exist in English but when it is uttered by the child everyone can understand what he means. In addition to the deletion of some sounds, children words are said to be not just any words i.e. children employ specific words such as cookie, drink, bad ,go, yes, no but never words like in, the , a and so on.
Accordingly, it is noticed at this stage of language development that a single word replaces a whole sentence. For example:
1- When the child uses the word “milk”, he is summarizing the full sentence of “please may I have some milk”.
2- A child who pronounces the word „mama‟ and at the same time using his finger to show the bag which is similar to his mother, does mean that he is calling his mother. In such a situation the means by „mom‟ that the bag belongs to my mother.
The following table illustrates the types of words that are employed by children during the holophrastic stage:
Table 01- Types of Words Used by Children with Productive Vocabularies of 50 Words.
Thus various kinds of words are employed but they differ in degree of use. That is to say, object words are used more than action word, modifiers, and personal words. Besides, the use of function words is almost absent where we can notice only a small number of them.