Indicator: Language (LANG)

Children show growing abilities in communication and language

During the infant, toddler, and preschool years, children demonstrate dramatic growth in their ability to understand communication from others, to remember and act upon that communication, to communicate their ideas and needs to others, and to engage in conversational interactions.

An infant is born without the ability to send intentional messages or understand intentional communication from others. Gradually, through consistent interactions with caregivers, infants learn to comprehend gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations; and they similarly learn to send messages to others. Once an infant is engaging in intentional communication, he then begins to understand and eventually use words symbolically, which means that he will understand the meaning of a word even in the absence of the object that the word represents.

Once a child is able to use words as symbols, he begins to rapidly acquire receptive and expressive vocabularies, that is, the words he understands and the words he uses. As children build to a working vocabulary of about fifty words, they begin to understand and produce two- and then three-word combinations. At this point, the process of learning the grammar of language begins. Children learn to comprehend and produce various parts of speech (nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, etc) and to use inflections to change verb tense, to indicate plurals or possessives. They also learn to change word order to combine ideas, to ask questions and to form negatives. In general, children will understand or comprehend grammatical constructions before they use them in speech.

During this same period, children become able to comprehend and remember longer messages. This is evidenced by their ability to follow instructions involving more than one step, as well as instructions that involve unfamiliar or new experiences. Children also are learning to use language for various social purposes and are learning the rules for engaging in conversation, such as how to initiate a conversation, maintain a topic, change a topic, and end a conversation.