Toddler Language Development Skills and Terms

This list is from my son’s baby book. He was an early talker but hard to understand at this age, so I would leave the (ever-growing) list with a new caregiver for translation. It is fairly typical of the words toddlers usually learn first and shows he was clearly in the naming period of language development.

VOCAB AT 13 MONTHS
Me-me (mommy)
Daddy (the obvious)
Doggy (dog or all animals)
Kitty (also may be all animals)
Cheese
Juice
Ba-bo (bagel)
Ba-ba (bottle)
Baa (his stuffed sheep)
All done
More
Doz (nose)
Boom (any loud noise)
Hi
Bye-bye
Dee (read a book)
Whee whee (the slide)
Uppie (pick me up)

Toddler Language Development Skills and Terms

Toddlers typically start their second year with anywhere from five to fifty words. Their receptive language far exceeds their expressive language (so they understand much more than they can say). In fact, by age two children can understand most of what is said by adults. Some toddlers may still be using word approximations (or sounds similar to a word, such as “momo” for “more”). Others may be already combining words. At around ten months, infants move to the naming period from the earlier prespeech period. The third stage is the word combination period, which runs from 18 months on. Just as toddlers can now pretend with objects, they now use sound combinations to form words to represent things or actions. Both abilities are dependent on cognitive advances made possible by motor and perceptual development, illustrating the interweave of developmental domains.

• GIBBERISH - What young children “speak” before understandable words are heard. Babies will string together consonant vowel sounds, and sometimes real words, that sound like speech but are not understandable to adults. This early “talking” helps children practice speaking by imitating adult language inflections and patterns. This also may be called babbling or jargon.
• UNDEREXTENSION - The toddler tendency to apply a word to fewer things than it actually means. For example, “kitty” is just our pet, not cats in general.
• OVEREXTENSION - When young children apply one word to a much larger category than appropriate. For example, a toddler might call all men “Daddy” or all food “’nana.”
• WORDS - Infants say their first word at anywhere between 8 and 18 months, with the average being about 12 months (just like first steps). Typical first words are important people or pets, actions, and moving objects. Specifically what words infants learn is dependent on their experiences and environment. At first, toddlers usually add one to three words a month, but they increase to ten to twenty per week at 18 to 24 months, with a total of up to 200 words by age two. Recent research has found that television and videos reduce vocabulary development by six to eight new words per hour of viewing (Zimmerman and Christakis, 2007).
• HOLOPHRASTIC SPEECH - An example of overextension. This is when a child uses just one word to indicate a whole idea. For example, “uppie” can mean pick me up, comfort me, carry me around, take me somewhere else, give me a hug, etc.
• PHRASES - Toddlers start putting two-word phrases together between 18 and 24 months. Combinations usually happen once toddlers have a vocabulary of approximately fifty words. Sometimes this toddler talking style (e.g., “Dada go” or “me cookie”) is referred to as telegraphic speech since it only includes the important words. Holophrastic speech (one word) usually precedes telegraphic speech (two words).
• SENTENCES - Soon after toddlers begin speaking in two-word phrases, they extend to three- and four-word utterances. These statements or questions will increasingly take the form of complete sentences. At age two, children can have vocabularies of anywhere from 50 to 900 words.
• SINGING, CHANTING, AND STORIES - Most toddlers love simple rhymes, songs, poems, and stories. They will try to sing or read along. People have used storytelling, singing, and rhyming through history for learning and memorizing. Toddlers crave and need repetition to learn.
• ONE- AND TWO-STEP DIRECTIONS - Young toddlers can follow simple one-step directions (“bring me the book”) and two-step directions by age two (“get your hat and put it on”). The toddler has the linguistic, cognitive, and motor skills to comply but needs to want to (social-emotional domain). This is yet another example of the interplay between developmental domains.
• REFERENTIAL LANGUAGE - Refers to objects and labeling things. For example, many toddlers will learn new nouns by pointing and asking, “What’s that?” (Or as one of my children said, “What it is?”) Individual characteristics and cultural values impact the style of communication favored by toddlers. For example, English and other European languages are more object-oriented than Asian and African languages.

Vignette:
This toddler communication style once saved me in a difficult situation. I was a new kibbutz volunteer and had been put in the two-year-old house to work. I panicked when I realized my Hebrew wasn’t up to the task, especially when the toddlers insisted that I read a book to them. So unable to read the Hebrew words, I simply pointed at pictures in the book and asked, “Ma za?” (What is it?) The children loved teaching me new nouns and never realized how little I actually knew!

• EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE - Differs from referential language because it is more socially focused. Instead of objects, this style emphasizes words for feelings, motion, and places. Predictably, the caregiver’s style is the main influence on the style of the toddler’s language. Note that this term applies to both this language pattern and the ability to communicate (or express) language.
• NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION - Refers to all communication that is not spoken. Toddlers’ skills at gesturing, body language, and facial expression improve exponentially, just like their verbal abilities. Pointing, reaching to be picked up, pushing away, kissing, waving, and pulling adults are all common toddler nonverbal usages. Some toddlers have learned ASL or other sign language, as discussed in the previous chapter. An early indicator of autism is a lack of pointing and paying attention to the gestures of others.
• BILINGUALISM - Children being raised multilingually will sometimes mix up words and syntax from different languages. This normal early confusion disappears as the bilingual child matures. For example, a toddler whose parents spoke both Hebrew and English may say “Push me Chigher,” using the throaty Hebrew letter Chet in place of the English H.
• DYSFLUENCIES - Stammering and mispronunciations are common in early talkers and usually self correct with time. Some particular sounds cannot be said correctly until children are much older (for example the sound “th”). Typically at age one, 25 to 50% of speech is intelligible, 65 to 70% by age two. Grammatical errors are common in new speakers (such as “I have two foots”) and are usually minimal by age three. Repeating the toddlers’ statement correctly (“you have two feet”) is much more appropriate than pointing out mistakes.