Language development: 2-3 years

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Here are some of the things your toddler might do as her language and communication skills develop between the ages of two and three years:

• at 30 months, say about 500 words, and understand hundreds more!
• by age three, may use nearly 1000 words and will learn new words every day
• use lots of nouns (baby, friend, car, boat) and also more verbs (play, go, walk), adjectives (wet, sore, cloudy), pronouns (he, she, I, you) and location words (in, on). She will start learning words such as ‘more’ and ‘most’, and words needed to make questions such as ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’
• begin to say ‘me’, ‘mine’ and ‘you’ and by three she will understand the difference between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’
• use two-word sentences at around two years of age and by age three, she will be able to use sentences with three or four words (‘Mummy get in car’, ‘Me go too’, ‘Put sock on foot’)
• begin to use sentence structure – for example, word endings (‘I go’ becomes ‘I’m going’), past tense (walked, fished) and plurals (cats, horses). She may not always get these right. For example, she might say ‘foots’ for ‘feet’, or ‘goed’ instead of ‘went’, because she is still trying to work out the rules of how language works
• start to get the hang of speaking in turn, and may be able to have a short conversation with you
• talk about things that have happened to her during the day. With some prompting, she may be able to sequence things into a simple story – for example, ‘I go shop.’  ‘And what did you do at the shop?’  ‘Buy lollies.’ By age three, she may be able to tell a simple ‘made-up’ story based on experiences that she has had. She will leave out lots of detail though
• talk about people and objects not present: ‘Grandma is at the shops’, ‘My ball is out in the tree’
• use most of the speech sounds of English in her words (by three), but she may still pronounce words differently from adults. For example, even though she can say the sounds ‘b’ and ‘l’, she may have trouble saying them together in ‘blue’. Her pronunciation will be understood by strangers 75% of the time by about three years of age
• begin to answer questions from adults about ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’, but may not yet understand how to answer ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions
• understand one-step and two-step instructions, as long as they’re about things she already knows – for example, ‘Pick up your toys and put them in the box’ or ‘Come over here and have some apple’
• know how to ask you for help if she cannot do something
• understand household routines and guess what is going to happen next in a routine – for example, if you tell her to put her boots on, she knows that she will be going to the park
• be able to accompany play with talk by age three – for example, giving voices to the dolls that she is playing with. She will begin to play in groups with other children, sharing toys and taking turns
• enjoy playing with language through rhyming, singing and listening to stories. She may use an overly loud or soft voice when speaking
• start talking the same way you or your partner talk, mimicking your pronunciation and emphasis. She may begin to ‘boss’ other people around, particularly younger children!

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