fuzzy line between recognizable sounds and first
words. By way of example, ‘‘mama’’ and ‘‘papa’’ will
be among the early sounds interpreted as words by
parents. With no intention of bursting bubbles, the
sounds used to make these ‘‘words’’ are easy for babies
to produce. Whether they really function as words is
another story. To qualify as real, a word must sound
like a known word and be used consistently—even in
different contexts—to mean the same thing. So, for
example, a child who uses the word ‘‘flower’’ to refer
only to a flower on the front porch and not to the
flower in the dining room vase is not credited with
having spoken a word.
First words are often body parts or proper names
(such as the name of the family pet), and they seem
to be learned laboriously during the first few months.
By sixteen months, most children say fifty words,
most of which are names for objects and people in
their environment (e.g., dog, daddy, ear, apple, juice,
bottle). After children reach this critical mass of fifty
words, something seems to happen inside that leads
to a ‘‘naming explosion.’’ Typical eighteen- to twenty-
month-olds can learn as many as nine new words a
day. Children need to hear a word used only once to
use it in a reasonably appropriate way.
This fifty-word watershed is also important for
another reason. After children achieve this critical
mass of words, they combine words for the first time.
Thus, at about eighteen months, grammar bursts
onto the productive scene. The first word combina-
tions that children produce omit articles (e.g., ‘‘the,’’
‘‘an’’), prepositions (e.g., ‘‘to,’’ ‘‘from’’) and inflec-
tions (e.g., plural ‘‘s,’’ ‘‘-ing’’), making the language
sound ‘‘telegraphic,’’ or as if children were sending a
telegram where words and particles cost money.
These children can now say ‘‘That kitty’’ to mean
‘‘That is a kitty’’ or ‘‘Daddy ball’’ to mean ‘‘Daddy has
a ball.’’ Everywhere in the world, children’s first word
combinations are expressing the same thoughts. Chil-
dren ask for more of something (e.g., ‘‘More milk’’),
reject things (e.g., ‘‘No bottle’’), notice things (e.g.,
‘‘Look kitty’’), or comment on the fact that something
disappeared (e.g., ‘‘Allgone milk’’). These children
express entire paragraphs in their short utterances
and talk about the ‘‘here and now’’ rather than about
the past or future.
The Third Year: Refining Grammar
When children are two to three, their grammati-
cal development becomes refined. Children may put
together an actor and a verb, ‘‘Mommy go,’’ or a verb
and an object, ‘‘eat lunch.’’ They are still limited by
how much they can produce at a given time. If, for ex-
ample, they wanted to say that they would not eat
lunch, they could not utter ‘‘No eat lunch’’ in the early
stages, but rather would have to limit their output to
‘‘No eat’’ or ‘‘No lunch.’’ Shortly, however, this win-
dow expands and the number of words they can use
in a sentence increases.
During the middle of the third year, children be-
come sophisticated grammar users who can speak in
longer sentences and who begin to include the small
grammatical elements that they omitted before. For
the first time, they use ‘‘ing’’ on their verbs, saying
‘‘running’’ whereas before they could only say ‘‘run.’’
They begin to add tense to their verbs (e.g., ‘‘walked’’)
and parents can even see evidence of grammatical
‘‘rules.’’ For example, the child who said ‘‘went’’ earli-
er may now know the past tense rule (add ‘‘-ed’’) and
may now say ‘‘goed’’—much to parents’ surprise. In
such cases, however, ‘‘went’’ eventually reemerges
and is used correctly.The Fourth Year: Language Use in Social
Situations
Having mastered the sound system of language,
learned the meanings of words, and learned how to
structure sentences, children turn their attention to
mastering the ways to use language in social situations
at around three or four years of age. The child who
says ‘‘More milk’’ is cajoled by parents to ‘‘use the
magic word—please.’’ Children now struggle to un-
derstand what people really mean to say. This is no
mean feat, as is shown by the four-year-old who took
the phone caller’s sentence literally when asked, ‘‘Is
your mother home?’’ This child answered ‘‘yes’’ and
then hung up on the caller! Children need to learn
that not all language can be taken literally.Deeper Understandings of Language
Development
As has been seen, children have a lot to learn in
their first three or four years, and they constantly
show what they know by what they say and how they
say it. In fact, what they say has been the universal
metric of language development. It is what the pedia-
trician records during routine office visits. And it is
what a parent quickly jots down in the child’s baby
book. Yet, to pay attention only to what is on the sur-
face would obscure most of what is going on in early
language development. There is so much more going
on behind the scenes.
In the late twentieth century and into the twenty-
first century, the headline news in infant psychology
has come from the ability to peer in on language de-
velopment during the first year of life. Indeed, there
has been a virtual explosion in understanding what
children can understand even before they can speak.
It has been learned, for example, that language learn-
ing starts in the womb. Newborns actually respond
differently to a poem that was read to them constantlyLANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 229