A toddler is a child aged between the
age of one and three. The toddler years are a great moment for social cognitive
and emotional development including language development. The pre-school age is
the children that are from three to four years old. Language development is a
process that begins in the early years of a child and continues throughout
childhood. It is a journey that a child begins right from infancy. Right from
toddler age, there are significant milestones in the development of the
semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, and pragmatics of the toddler. The
language development advances, as the child gets older through preschool age.
The phonological achievement of the
toddlers is more noticeable as compared to the children at infancy. The child
begins making structures of sounds that make sense. They start combining words,
morphemes, and clauses that are more communicative (Turnbull and Justice199). The children also repeat the words that they are aware
of more and so it is easy for the adult to identify them. It is a trait that
continues through to the preschool where the child engages in multiple
activities and hence the adults have an opportunity to witness and hear the
sounds that they have acquired. At preschool, the child has mastered the
consonants unlike in the toddler stage; the child can learn more words and
contextualize their speech (Turnbull and Justice238). It is because then the child is exposed to more
literary through the activities they engage in such as pretend play and hence
acquire skills that are more literary.
The major morphological achievements of
the toddler are that they begin to combine words that they learned to make even
longer utterances and also begin to use different sentence forms. The
grammatical morphemes appear at this level at first since the child has learned
more than their first 50 words (Turnbull and Justice207). The combination of more than one word that the child
begins marks the first stage of syntax development. For example instead of
saying “ball†when they want their favorite ball, they may say “mommy ballâ€
marking the combination of words. At the preschool stage of development, the
child continues to combine more than one word but instead of two words like in
toddler’s stage, they combine four to five words. The child also compound
sentences combining articles and uses past tense. By the end of the preschool
stage at around 60 months, the child can combine up to eight words in a sentence
(Turnbull and Justice244).
The toddlers acquire language skills as
they grow and can be able to instrumental functions that include making a
request to meet their needs and use regulatory functions such as making of
commands to control other people’s behavior. They may depict a skill at
starting a conversation but may not sustain it for a long time, and it is the
adult that has to maintain the conversation. They may also use pronouns without
describing the particular individual being referred to such as saying “he is
cheating.†At the end of the preschool age, the child can make the compound and
complex sentences that can be highly communicative. For example, the child may
make a compound sentence such as “I told Daddy and Daddy told mommy.†Just as
the case with toddlers, they may experience e some omissions in their sentences
but can communicate in a social conversation.
Preschoolers just as is the case with
toddlers can be able to use the principle of novel name-nameless category (N3C)
to be able to match labels to objects that they are not aware of their names.
They can then fast map the unfamiliar words through the process (Turnbull and Justice248). For example when you present a child with three names
that they know and then a fourth one that they are not aware of and then shows
four objects that go by the names, the child can eliminate the words and
objects they are aware of and then attach the new word to the new object. At
the preschool age, the child has an understanding of words but they require
more exposure to the phrase in varying contexts to attain a full and complete
understanding of the meaning of the word, which is also referred to as the
extended mapping.
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