Speech - 1 to 2 years
© DK
This year your child will make great strides forward in terms of both physical and intellectual development. She'll increase her vocabulary, and her grasp of grammatical construction will greatly improve.
In order to speak properly she'll have to unlearn some of the habits she got into when her speech consisted of babbling. For example, in babbling, consonants are frequently dropped, and duplicated words are common. Once your child gains control of her speech she'll constrain the errors and substitutions that she used to make.
The beginnings of classification in your child's speech
As your child learns to recognize and identify objects she'll begin to classify and group them. However, at the beginning this process won't be completely accurate. She'll look at several objects and use the same word to identify all of them if they have one or more features in common. This is referred to as overextension. The reason she uses words generically like this is because she hasn't the ability to articulate all words, but her desire to communicate with you is so strong that she has to use the nearest word that she can. Your child will link words together on the following bases:
Shape
Balls, apples or stones may all be called “ball”.
Size
A handbag, a polythene bag and a shopping basket may all be “bag”.
Sound
A whistle, a siren and a car horn may all be “beep”.
Movement
A bicycle, a car, a bus and a train may all be “choo-choo”. Although your child over-extends in this way she does know the difference between two things she calls by the same name. For example, she may use the word “guck” for truck and duck, and yet when faced with pictures of them both and asked to point out a truck and a duck she'll make the distinction between the two.
In the same way, children can under-extend words. For most children the word animal usually just applies to mammals and the animals that they meet in their everyday life; they very often have difficulty in understanding that fish, insects and birds can be categorized as animals too. Whatever early words your child learns she'll soon begin to use them to mean a variety of things. A single word can be a label for a greeting, a demand or a question. At the beginning your child may often add gestures to single words to give them meaning. Later on she'll learn to change her intonation as a signal for different meanings.
The first sentences in your child's speech
Some time before your child's second birthday she'll start to string words together. This is an important milestone because it shows that she's now aware of the relationship between objects. Your baby's first sentences will be limited in their meanings. They'll probably explain something that has just happened or describe what someone is doing. Her sentences will be concerned with:
| What’s happening: |
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| Who possesses what: |
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| Where things are: |
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| Repetition: |
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| Where something’s gone: |
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Her sentences won't follow adult grammatical rules, that will develop later, but they will have a logical construction of their own. She'll learn fairly early that certain words are used together. She'll repeatedly hear “Pick up”, “Put on “, “Go out”, and will continue to use them as one word even when joining them on to others. So she'll have “Car pick up”, “Door go out”. She'll make the past tense by adding “d” to anything - “I wented”, “You goed”, “I gaved”. To make words plural she'll add an “s” to the end -”Look, fishes”, “Mouses”, “Gameses”.
New Babycare
Copyright © 2009 Dorling Kindersley
Text copyright © 2009 Miriam Stoppard
Posted 30.06.2010
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