The Two Word Stage of Language Development

Foundations of Speech

• Children understand language long before they can produce words. Babies' early sounds do communicate something, but you often have to guess what it is. They also experiment with making sounds that don't mean anything. At around 9 to 18 months, children start using recognizable words. Usually these are names of people or things as their focus moves outward into the world around them. At first they will use their own version of a word, but by 14 to 24 months, they are using real words, including action verbs and words such as "bye-bye."

The Two-Word Stage

• Up until now, your child has relied on tone of voice and gestures, like pointing, to get meaning across with a single word. The two-word stage is an important transition toward using sentences. Children at this stage speak in short phrases such as "doggy bad" or "Mommy do." They use the same words as earlier, but they put them together in a logical order. They may also begin to use descriptive words like colors and words that tell where something is, but they use only the most important words they need. (This may soon be three or four words, so the period is sometimes called the early multi-word stage.) "Baby talk" can occur between 18 and 30 months. During this time, children learn new words each week, moving from a vocabulary of about 50 words to about 200 to 300 words.

The Pace of Development

• It's important to remember that these stages occur naturally. Outside factors don't have much to do with children's progress, other than the fact they hear speech. Growth will alternate with periods of little change or "backsliding," and using any word will lag behind understanding it by several months. It also takes a while for children to physically be able to make all the sounds correctly. A child with very basic vocabulary will often have a sudden spurt of acquiring new words, and any problems usually resolve themselves by age 4. So trying to "work on" things with your child will usually just increase the stress level. On the other hand, don't use baby talk yourself. That confuses children, who are perfecting their speech slowly from your model.

What to Expect Next

• When children graduate from this "telegraphic" speech, they begin using up to six words together, including some correct forms (like plurals) and little words like "and" and "the." This is when their speech will start to sound like an adult's. For a year or more, children will go back and forth into baby talk, doing it less and less. By kindergarten age, they will be learning 10 words a day, making longer sentences that others usually understand, and using past and future tense. But they will continue improving their speech throughout the elementary years.