One of the most important moments for parents is there child’s first word, displaying the child's mental and physical development, this usually occurs one year into the child’s life.

A child if one can recognise fifty words but pronounce only one vowel and three consonants. The individual sounds vary as some children have favourite sounds, and others purposely avoid sounds, perhaps dropping “t”s at the ends of words so cat becomes ca’. Children will often play with sounds, pronouncing the same word in many ways, before regularly using the correct version (one child managed to pronounce “pen” ten different ways in half an hour). Yet by the age of two and a half he/she will have mastered all of the vowels and two thirds of the consonants. And by four years he will have trouble with only a few consonants.

To make words easier to say children will simplify them in a number of different ways:

Simplification by deletion, where consonant clusters are avoided e.g. “play” becomes “pey”.

Simplification by substitution, harder sounds are replaced with easier ones e.g. “yellow” becom

At around eighteen months the emergence of grammar is noticeable, children are beginning to use two word sentences, and prepositions, e.g. “on head”, words showing possession, “my cat”, and pronouns, “he hot”. Grammatically correct sequences are often subject and verb, e.g. “Tom is running”, but pronounced “Tom running”. These two word sentences fall into a number of categories: An actor performing an action, an action affecting an object, an object being given a location and an object/person being described.

The sorting out of these grammatical faux pas, is a feature of the four year old child’s’ speech, as they begin producing long, fluent, error free monologues, however some problems still occur e.g. “It just got eatened”, or “I’m tired at playing”. The sorting out of grammar continues into the early school years.

Between the ages of three and five the child learns pragmatic skills such as correct forms of address, politeness and making indirect requests.

Another important feature of language is the ability to say “No”. In the first year, gesture is used a lot to express this, turning back, shaking head etc. At about eighteen months the first negatives “no or not”, are used. During the second year, negatives are comb

Some topics in this essay:
, Inversion Rule, Prince Denmark, word sentences, “tom running”, allowing child, auxiliary verbs,