Year 1 – Babies work on speech sounds (often known as vegetative noises) to express pain, pleasure of hunger. The first sound they make is crying. At six to nine months old this becomes babbling which is not learnt or copied but pre-programmed. The work out of the vocal-chords means babies repeat syllables over and over.
Year 2 – An increase in the ability to manipulate speech sounds. The second year can be roughly divided up into three sub-stages: ‘one-word’, ‘two-word’ and ‘telegraphic’. During the one-word stage children concentrate on building phonemes into words, beginning largely with nouns that reflect their needs/interests. Single words can convey more than one meaning, and when they do it is called a holophrase. Holophrases are used as a substitute for complex grammar – i.e “Milk!” may mean “I want some milk!” or “I’ve spilt some milk!”
This then develops overtime into two word phrases, and then a few months after the two-word stage (age varying from child to child) comes what is known as the telegraphic stage. This is where children begin using increasingly complex multi-word sentences. Grammatical words and endings are also present, and this stage includes all the important function words whilst leaving out things like conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and prepositions.
Year 3 – A child’s pragmatic ability is greater, and they are effective language users.
Year 4 – Children are sophisticated language users by year four. Their use of language is purposeful.
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