Different Stages Of Child Language Development

Holophrastic stage = One word phrases

Two word stage of development = Two word phrases (Pivot and open words)

Telegraphic stage of development = Between the ages of 2 and a half years old, children progress to three word telegraphic speech. Typical use of minor and elliptical sentencing content. Function words (grammatical words) are omitted e.g. a child will likely miss out copula and auxiliary verbs and say something like ‘ I having crisps’ rather then ‘I am having crisps’.

Post Telegraphic stage of development = Approx after the age of 3, children will begin learning and using more complex grammatical functions. At this stage more grammatical complexities such as auxiliaries, clause structures and fuller syntactic utterances. Children often combine clause structures by using coordinating conjunctions such as ‘and’ and ‘but’ and subordinating conjunctions such as ‘because and ‘although’.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: The stages are only applicable to Grammar. Ways of linking could be when analysing a child’s syntax, adjectives, nouns, use of function/content words, clauses of reasoning, pronouns, negations etc..