3 TO 4 YEARS: LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

At 3, your child should have an active vocabulary of 300 or more words. He'll be able to talk in sentences of five or six words and imitate most adult speech sounds. At times, he'll seem to be chattering constantly, a phenomenon that may sometimes disturb you but which is essential to his learning of new words and gaining experience in using and thinking with them. Language allows him to express his thoughts, and the more advanced he is in speaking and understanding words, the more tools he'll have for thinking, creating and telling you about it.

At this age, your child's speech should be clear enough that even strangers can understand most of what he says. Even so, he still may mispronounce as many as half the speech sounds he uses. For example, he may use w for r ("wabbit," "wice," "wose"), d for th ("dis," "dat," "den"), or t for any sounds he has trouble with ("tee" for three, "tik" for six). The sounds b, p, m, w and h will only begin to emerge midway through this year, and it may take months after that for him to perfect his use of them.

Expanding Vocabulary

You should be able to see how your child uses language to help him understand and participate in the things going on around him. For instance, he can name most familiar objects, and he'll freely ask "What's this?" when he can't call something by name. You can help him expand his vocabulary by providing additional words that he might not even request. For example, if he points to a car and says, "Big car," you might answer, "Yes, that's a big gray car. Look how shiny the surface is." Or if he's helping you pick flowers, describe each one he collects. "That's a beautiful white-and-yellow daisy, and that's a pink geranium."

You also can help him use words to describe things and ideas he can't see. When he's describing the "monster" in his dream, for example, ask him if the monster is angry or friendly. Ask him about the monster's color, where he lives, whether he has friends. Not only will this help your child use words to express his thoughts, but also it may help him overcome his fear of such strange and frightening images.

Explaining Pronouns

Your 3-year-old is still learning to use pronouns, such as "I," "me," "mine" and "you." As simple as these words seem, they're difficult ideas to grasp, because they indicate where his body, possessions or authority ends and someone else's begins. And to complicate matters, the terms change depending on who's talking. Often, he may use his name instead of saying "I" or "me." Or when talking to you, he may say "Mommy" instead of "you." If you try to correct him (for example, by suggesting, "Say 'I would like a cookie' "), you'll only confuse him more, because he'll think you're talking about yourself. Instead, use these pronouns correctly in your own speech. Say "I would like you to come" instead of "Mommy would like you to come." Not only will this help him learn the correct use of these words, but it will help him establish a sense of you as an individual apart from your role as Mommy.