CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.0              Background to the Study Language is a peculiar gift of nature to man.  It is a central and complex phenomenon to all human beings. It stands at the centre of all human endeavours from the onset of human civilization. Language is the means of acquisition of all manner of knowledge and the tool by which morals, ethics and beliefs that govern human lives are passed on to the succeeding generations. It is the medium of thought and expression of human wants, desires, emotions, ideas, both positive and negative. Clark and Clark (1977) see language as a basic ingredient in virtually every social situation. However, no one is born an adult with full possession of this vehicle of thought and expression. Rather, a man is born an infant who passes through various stages of growth, which significantly impact on his use of language. A child does not also begin to speak automatically when the time comes for him to; he undergoes some stages before and after the onset of meaningful utterances with which he communicates with his environment. As a result of the inevitability of language in human life, parents look forward with great expectation to seeing their children utter the first words. As a special area of human life, psycholinguistics is the field of language studies that handles the issue of language acquisition. As Berry (1975) puts it, psycholinguistics is the discipline that discusses both psychological and linguistic issues in relation to each other. A central question in psycholinguistics is the issue of child language acquisition which could be perceived as the process by which a human..

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