Language development

Receptive vocabulary (words recognised when heard or seen)

• At 36 months, understands 1000 or more words. Acquires an average of 1500-2000 words during this year.
• The average child has the capacity to acquire 4-6 words per day, given access to new words in her daily experiences.
• Continues to learn words when adults name objects, and increases ability to infer word meanings from context. Many new words are also learned through new experiences and from hearing picture books read aloud.
• Continues to increase their vocabularies for nouns (names of things, such as common objects and familiar people), pronouns, action words, descriptive words, quantifiers, location words, and question words. Also, has a major vocabulary increase in connecting words (e.g. and, because, but, if).
• Other categories of vocabulary growth include number words, emotional state words (e.g. sad, happy, angry, mad, excited, frightened), common category names (e.g. toys, furniture, clothes, fruits, animals) and common family member names (e.g. mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, brother).

Language comprehension

• Shows an increased ability to listen to and understand conversations, stories, songs and poems.
• Follows multi-step directions involving familiar objects, actions and routines, including those that are sequential but not related, such as: ‘Take your coats off and hang them up and then go sit on the rug for story time’ or ‘Jason, take Katie's hand and go stand by the door’ or ‘Pick up these cylinder blocks, and then put the dolls back in their beds’.
• Understands explanations when concrete objects and actions support the verbal explanation, and phenomena are directly observable; for example, ‘When we mix colours, we get a new colour. See what colour you get when you mix yellow with blue’.

Speech sound perception

• Perception of speech sounds that aren't used in native language continues to decrease. Exposure to a second or a third language helps children to continue to perceive a wider range of speech sounds, making learning a second language easier.
• Identifies vocal changes when someone is reading and talking (e.g. when someone is reading a book, the child can tell if the person is reading the text of the book or talking about pictures in the book).

Expressive/productive vocabulary (words used when speaking or writing)

• From age three on, it is difficult to measure actual productive vocabulary (productive language), but the number of words that children understand is always larger than the number of words they actually use. As children understand more words, there will be changes in the nature of the words children use for speaking and writing.
• Continues to over- and under-extend the meanings of words (e.g. a child calls a cow ‘horsie’), but to a lesser degree for fairly common items. For example, a child unfamiliar with a wheelbarrow may call it ‘wagon’ given that both have a cavity, a handle and wheels.

Pronunciation

• Makes major improvements in pronunciation. While some children may continue to have some difficulty, most are easily understood by adults who are not familiar with them.
• Starts to engage in word play and rhyming words.

Grammatical development

• Communicates in simple, grammatical sentences, often using a series of simple sentences to relate ideas. Some children may talk in monologue, as if practising language. In the first part of this year, children are forming question and negative sentence structure; for example, ‘Why you aren't going?’ rather than ‘Why aren't you going?’
• Applies general past tense rule to irregular past tense verbs (e.g. ‘runned’ for ‘ran,’ and ‘teached’ for ‘taught’). Also, applies general plural rule to irregular nouns (e.g. ‘mouses’ for ‘mice,’ and ‘tooths’ for ‘teeth’).

Sharing personal experiences

• Begins to initiate the telling of personal experiences, but offers only the main events at first, leaving out a lot of the details of the context necessary for a non-participant to understand the whole ‘story’. For example, a child announces, ‘I got some shells’. Teacher asks, ‘Did you get them at a shop or did you find them on a beach?’ Child says, ‘At the beach’. Teacher asks, ‘So, you went to the beach and found some shells. Who took you?’ Child says, ‘Sally’. Teacher says, ‘Oh, Jeremiah's mum?’ Child says, ‘Yes, she taked us there to swim’.

Conversational skills

• Initiates conversations using phrases like ‘Guess what?’ or ‘You know what?’
• Typically does not interrupt current speaker, but has difficulty in waiting for a turn in a group conversation. Wants to speak after each speaker regardless.
• Tends to use turn to relate information of personal interest regardless of topic established by peers or adults.
• May have trouble talking with someone on the phone because the topics of questions asked are often not related to the ‘here and now’.

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