Did you know that children learn language in different ways?
There are two ways that a child may acquire language. These are known as analytic and gestalt. Understanding the way a child is building language skills can help parents and those around them to understand what their child is trying to communicate.

Analytic Language Processing
“Typical” language acquisition (historically known as this).
Child learns single words as units first (ex: “go”).
Progression of language learning moves towards combining words into different phrases and sentences (ex: “I want to go” or “go in”).

Gestalt Language Processing (GLP)
Begins with the child imitating phrases he or she previously heard (delayed echolalia).
A child then breaks down the phrase as he or she learns the meaning of the individual words.
The child uses those individual words to build other, novel phrases and sentences to communicate.

Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) describes a gestalt language developmental process through defined NLA stages. A gestalt language processor will go through these stages in order to develop language from whole gestalts to recognising single words as individual units of language. Once a learner is able to ‘free’ these words through the process of mitigation, the child gains flexibility in their language allowing them to produce ‘self-generated’ utterances.

Please download the documents below for further support and information.