Language development in the early years

By age 5, children readily understand, produce, and interact with language. In their first year, they attend to sounds and sound sequences, and a few words. Next, they communicate with gestures and words, adding words to memory for recognition and for targets in production. By age 2, they produce word-combinations, adding complexity with inflections and grammatical morphemes. By age 3 or 4, they produce relative clauses, temporal, conditional, and causal clauses, and many question types. At all ages, conversational interaction offers practice and feedback on what they understand and say, and simultaneously exposes them to further uses of language.