34 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
500 words (Miller and Paul 1995). In terms of the use of language,
many of the same communicative intentions are expressed at this
stage with the emergence of two new functions—the imaginative
function to accompany early symbolic play and the informative
function in which the child talks about absent objects (Halliday
1975). Dore’s (1975) primitive speech act system continues to
provide another useful taxonomy for describing children’s early
communicative intentions at this stage.
Following the Two-Word Stage, children enter the Early
Syntactic-Semantic Complexity Stage, which lasts from about two
to three-and-a-half years (Gerber and Prizant 2000). Understanding
and producing three-word utterances such as “drink more juice”
characterize this stage. In these utterances, semantic notions such
as action and recurrence are coordinated within the same phrase.
Children begin to produce multiverb combinations such as “wanna
drink juice.” They also begin to use grammatical morphemes such
as the present progressive verb inflection to code ongoing action,
the plural marker to code quantity, and the words “in” and “on”
to code location. At this point in semantic development, young
children can talk about many ideas and notions. In terms of the
pragmatic use of language, children demonstrate a broad range
of communicative functions with the majority of their utterances
related to the “here and now.” During this stage of development,
children might produce utterances such as “I’m putting my blocks
in the box” and “That goes here.” They use many linguistic verb
and noun markers, such as the contractible auxiliary, present
progressive verb tense, plural “-s,” and third person singular verb
marker as in the foregoing examples. At this point, children are
capable of producing grammatically complete simple sentences and
understand sentences based on morpho-syntactic rules. Children
also comprehend a greater variety of question types including “why”
and “how many” (Gerber and Prizant 2000; Miller and Paul 1995).