Language Development: The Post-Telegraphic Stage (3-5 Years)

Continuing Development: This stage marks continued language development, where children enhance their language skills in more complex ways.
- They become capable of sustaining conversations.
- They combine ideas using coordinating conjunctions ('and', 'but') and subordinating conjunctions ('because').

Connecting Words: The use of words such as 'because', 'and', and 'if' expands.
Number Words: Children learn and use words related to numbers.
Emotion-Related Words: Their vocabulary includes words connected with emotions.
Family Terms: They acquire and use family terms like 'auntie' and 'brother'.
Colors: Children learn names for different colors.
Contrasting Concepts: Understanding opposing concepts like 'longer' and 'bigger' develops.

Hypernyms and Hyponyms: Children start distinguishing between:
- Hypernyms: Words for categories (e.g., 'animals', 'vegetables').
- Hyponyms: Words within those categories (e.g., 'cat', 'hamster', 'carrot', 'cabbage').

Learning New Words: Young children acquire thousands of new words by listening to family members and guessing meanings from context.
Wider Social Network: Exposure to playgroups and stories increases understanding of many more words than they actively use.
Longer Words: They begin using longer words, often with three or more syllables (e.g., 'elephant', 'helicopter'), and enjoy saying these new, complex words.

Syntax and Lexis: Increased knowledge of syntax and lexis is accompanied by an understanding of inflection principles, such as past tenses and plurals.
Virtuous Errors: Children make mistakes by applying regular grammatical endings to irregular forms (e.g., 'runned', 'mouses', 'goed', 'swimmed', 'wented').

Purpose: To demonstrate children's application of grammatical rules.
Method:
- Children were shown a picture of an imaginary creature called a 'wug'.
- They were then shown a picture of two of these creatures and asked to complete the sentence 'There are two ___'.
Result: Children applied the grammatical rule of adding 's' for plurals and responded 'wugs'.

Increased Fluency: Children become more fluent between three and five years old.
Handling Lexical Demands: They can manage greater lexical demands and talk appropriately in different situations (e.g., family, playgroup).
Question Forms and Negation: They use question forms (e.g., 'Can I have one?') and negation (e.g., 'He doesn't want one.').
Auxiliary Verbs:
- 'Do' appears first, followed by 'can' and 'will'.
- Children may duplicate modal verbs (e.g., 'Please may can I…?'), showing an understanding that 'may' indicates politeness, while 'can' indicates ability.

Complex Utterances: By this stage, children can handle more complex utterances with two or more parts.
Multiple Meanings: By age three, children understand that words often have more than one meaning, though they may still mix things up.

Scenario: A conversation between Oscar (aged three) and his mother during a game.
Oscar's utterances:
- "Mummy I winned"
- “No, you won”
- "I winned mummy"
- "No Oscar, you won"
- "I not one I three"
What stage?: Oscar is in the telegraphic stage
Evidence:
- Oscar says "mummy I winned" and "I winned mummy." This shows he understands basic word order but overgeneralizes the past tense rule by adding "-ed" to "win".
- He also says "I not one I three," which is a sentence with simplified grammar but correct word order. He also only uses a few words at a time when speaking.

Understanding Homophones: The mix-up of homophones (words that sound the same) shows Oscar's understanding of words that sound alike ('one'/'won') but not their different meanings.

Understanding Idioms: Children begin to understand idioms (expressions with non-literal meanings).
- Example: 'You're pulling my leg' means 'you're teasing me.'
- This understanding starts around age three but develops later.

Chatter and Questions: The period from three to five years is a time of rapid learning; children enjoy chatter and ask many questions.
Clear Conversation: Caregivers can usually understand them, even with errors in more complex structures.

Preschool/Nursery Education: Children experience the wider world through preschool or nursery education.
New Language and Conversation: They are exposed to new language and conversation by interacting with other children and adults.

Effortless Conversation: Children can converse effortlessly in most situations.
Complex Language Structures and Tenses: They understand and articulate complex language structures and tenses.
Conditional Tense: They use the conditional tense, understanding possibility or uncertainty (e.g., 'If it stops raining, we could go to the park.').
Abstract Ideas and Idioms: They understand abstract ideas and idioms.
Conversations: They participate in conversations, though they may mainly be interested in talking about themselves.

Progress: They have come a long way from early babbles and coos.
Full Linguistic Participants: They are set to become full linguistic participants in their world.