Language Development
"Throughout early childhood children rapidly expand their
vocabularies, their use of grammatical forms, and their understanding of
language as a sociocultural activity." (Craig, 260)
Grammar
In 1973 Roger Brown and his colleagues recorded the conversations
of young children, and used the MLU (the average length of a child's sentence)
to define five stages of language development.
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Stage One: During this stage children use two-word
utterances to convey their thoughts.
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Stage Two: Children of this stage tend to use
utterances slightly longer than two words. Children often confuse
the past and present tense, sometimes saying: "played" instead of
"play". They also overreguralize verbs, sometimes saying: "goed"
instead of "went", or "breaked" instead of "broke."
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Stage Three: Children tend to modify simple
sentences, and ask yes or no questions. Also, children do not understand
passive voice.
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Stage Four and Five: During this stage children
start to form complex and compound sentences using clauses.
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