Thanks to Yu Xun, a young intern at Ute’s International Lounge,  and Amanda, owner of Miss Panda, my infographic 5 Stages of Additional Language Acquisition got translated into Chinese. 

Following an interesting discussion with some clients and members of my facebook group Multilingual Families who are raising their children with multiple languages, and Chinese is one of them, I realized that the information parents get for Chinese language development is slightly different from what I am used to share.
What is important to know is that children around the world go through the same stages of language acquisition and their first words are all /papa/, /tata/ – an occlusive (in the study here below “non-pulmonic”) sound /p t k/ in combination with the most open vowel sound /a/.

For the consonants, the study by Sharynne McLeod and Kathryn Crowe, Children’s Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review, offers an interesting overview about the order young children tend to be able to produce consonants. This is a chart about English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish:

I find important for parents to know  that “children’s consonant acquisition is a key feature of children’s overall development, enabling them to perceive and produce intelligible speech and interact with members of society. “. Furthermore, “children master some categories of phonemes (manner/place) using a similar pattern of acquisition across languages” and we can observe a “wide range and large standard deviations in the acquisition of some individual phonemes”. 
I usually advise parents to observe their children’s language development, their understanding, speech production, perception and overall cognition skills, their interaction capacities, in all kind of societal contexts (at home, outside of home).

You can find more detailed information about Chinese language development (in Chinese) on this website (https://kknews.cc/baby/8znglgl.html)

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