A Developmental Perspective on Language Acquisition 29Two-Word
Utterances18–24 months Toddlers combine words
with word-order rules to
express basic meanings and
communicate with others.
Early Syntactic-
Semantic
Complexity2–3½ years Children produce three-word
utterances and early grammatical
morphemes to express a
greater variety of meanings and
communicative functions.
Later
Syntactic-
Semantic
Complexity3½–7 years Children produce multiverb
utterances and grammatically
complex sentences, express
more cognitively sophisticated
meanings, engage in longer
conversations, and tell stories.
Communicative
Competence7–12 years Children have well-developed
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic
skills. Their conversational skills are
more advanced, and they vary their
language with the communicative
context. They understand and
produce nonliteral language.
(adapted from Gerber and Prizant 2000)Individual differences in rate aside, the first stage, the Pre-
intentional, begins at birth and lasts until about eight months.
The infants’ gaze, smiles, laughter, cries, and other vocalizations
characterize this prelinguistic stage. Infants express interest in the
world of people and objects around them by touching and grasping
for objects and by attending to people as social partners. This
stage lays the groundwork for the development of comprehension
or the understanding of language. Although infants do not have
the ability to communicate intentionally during this time period,
this stage is noteworthy for adults’ frequent responses to infants’
behaviors as if they were intentional. For example, a child might
gaze and smile at the adult, who attributes the child with having
expressed an intention such as being content. The infant might