How toddlers learn to speak

Your role in language development
Throughout your child's fourth and fifth years, his language skills race ahead. By five years of age, most children use up to 2,200 words and understand up to 9,600. But it isn't just the number of words that increases. The child also begins to use language in new and creative ways. Ask your daughter to clear up her crayons, and she might tell you she'll do it as soon as she has finished what she's building with her blocks. Such an answer shows she is using language to make an argument and to plan the next few minutes. It also shows that language is enabling her to develop her concept of time. But you might want to ask her to pick up her crayons anyway!

You've probably been reading to your child since he could sit still and listen. Keep it up. Reading aloud to children helps them develop the listening side of oral language as well as a love of words. His speaking skills also develop out of his awareness of the sounds or phonemes that go together to make words and parts of words. Developing a child's appreciation of words and his awareness of story provides some of the motivation for him to read for himself.

In all your conversations with your child, be aware of his age and comprehension, but don't artificially limit the range of your vocabulary and sentences. As the figures attest, children understand far more than they are yet capable of articulating. Respond with full sentences to his chatter, not just occasional one-word interjections such as mm-hmm.

When you play with your child, continue to describe what you are doing to expose her to new words and new ideas. Ask questions about what she is doing and help her flesh out the answers by supplying more details of your own. If you ask what she's doing with her blocks and she answers, "Making a house," you might say, "That house is almost big enough for me to fit in." Your response has introduced the idea of size and the concept of fitting one thing inside another - not to mention providing a model for the use of the pronoun me.

Parents are the first models for their children's speech. The more exposure children have to language and the more language is part of their family's everyday life, the more capable the children become of comprehending and using listening and speaking skills. These skills are essential to first learning and then refining the more complex skills of communication - reading what others write or writing what you want others to read.

Excerpted from Growing with Your Child: pre-Birth to age 5 by Christine Langlois. Copyright 1998 by Telemedia Communications Inc. Excerpted, with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.