Language Development in Young Children
Prepared by Susan Keehn, Ph.D.
Phonetic Development
Can make the 44 sounds (phonemes) in English language
Engages in sound play, such as spontaneous rhyming.
Uses expressive features such as intonation, stress, pauses.
Begins to associate letters with their sounds (metalinguistic awareness)
Begins to be aware of sounds (“Mommy sounds like McDonald’s”)
Syntactic Development
Uses negation in increasing complexity
“No want peas.”
“I no want juice.”
“I’m not going on the bus.”
Uses subject-verb agreement and increased complexity with SVO
“I ride train.”
Uses auxiliary verbs
“I can see it.” “We will go to the zoo.”
Uses interrogatives (initially declarative order; later inverted order)
“Why she is happy?” “Why is he crying?”
Semantic Development
Vocabulary becomes more precise. Receptive and expressive vocabulary
increase dramatically during this period.
Responds to idiomatic expressions, sometimes jokingly
“Why don’t you hop on over” and child literally hops, laughing
Uses overextension or underextension
Child calls cherry “candy” because they are sweet (overextension)
Child calls next-door neighbor’s cat “cat” but no other cat (underext.)
Morphemic Development
Experiments with language to determine how word endings affect meaning.
Often overgeneralizes
“We goed”
“He falled down.”
“They does”
Combines tenses in story retellings, but eventually uses past tense consistently
Begins to use comparatives
Big bigger biggest
Good gooder goodest
Pragmatic Development
Oral Language
Child use language to request permission, to invoke social rules,
to express emotions, to make judgments, to joke or tease.
Conversations turn-taking grows.
Child tailors language to fit situation, using more than one register.
Changes talk for parent or teacher
Often evident in sociodramatic play
Loudness, tempo, intonation vary for emphasis.
Storybook Interactions
Child learns directionality of print.
Child follows book from beginning to end.
Child learns story language: “Once upon a time….”
Child learns that text is stable: Words in story will be same for every reading
Emergent Literacy
Child interacts with print:
(1) seeing print in environment
(2) adult models
(3) opportunities to read
(4) opportunities to write
Child asks adult to “read” his/her creation of print.
Adapted from Otto, B. (2002). Language development in early childhood. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Fostering Oral Language Development
Productive talk doesn’t just happen. It is planned for and facilitated.
Physical Environment
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Established rules and procedures
Flexible room arrangement to allow for flexible groupings
o Child to child
o Small group conversations
o Child to large group
o Child to adult
Interesting classroom to stimulate talk
Psychological Environment
 Teacher display of acceptance & respect toward students
 Teacher listens
 Teacher values all students equally
Establishing a psychological environment in which children feel valued and
comfortable enough to take risks is essential for initiating and maintaining
productive talk in the classroom.
Opportunities to Talk
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Teacher offers students many opportunities to engage in talk:
Children learn language and how to use it through social interactions where
language serves genuine purposes.
Less teacher talk!
Most effective activities include:
Small group discussions
Informal conversations
Storybook reading
Storytelling/ Sharing
Creative dramatics
Sociodramatic play
Language games
Teacher guarantees opportunities to use language for a full range of
intellectual and social purposes
Teacher provides exciting curriculum so that child have lots to talk about!
Based on Dudley-Marling & Searle’s When Students Have Time to Talk: Creating Contexts for Language
Learning ; Stabb’s Oral Language for Today’s Classroom; and Pinnell & Jagger’s Oral Language: Speaking
and Listening in the Classroom in Handbook of Research on the Teaching of the English Language Arts.