• Asks “what” and “where” questions

• Uses plurals, e.g. “dogs”

• Most speech is understood by caregiver

• Simple understanding of concepts including color, space, time

• Understands “why” questions

• Understands most simple sentences

• Children learn many new words by listening to adults and guessing from context​

• Knows/uses names for groups of things like ‘vegetables’ or ‘animals’

• Knows family terms like ‘brother’ or 'sister'

• Name basic emotions like ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry'

• Learning more about how to put words together into sentences

•  Begin to use more complex sentences that include words like ‘because’, ‘so’, ‘if’ and ‘when’ – for example, ‘I don’t like that because it’s yucky’

• Understand the basic rules of grammar. E.g. possessives - ‘daddy’s hat’. You’ll hear past and present tense too, like ‘talked’ and ‘talk’

• Child might be using ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘me’ correctly. But they might confuse the use of negatives

• By 4 years speech sounds are still developing; might still have trouble pronouncing words that include the sounds ‘l’, ‘th’ or ‘r’

• Child is able to have several back and forth conversational turns

• Begin to tell stories with a beginning and end, but may need prompts to keep the story going

• Child will be able to do some simple negotiation with other children. For example, they’ll be able to talk about who can play with a toy first 

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• By 5 years and beyond, children can mostly use the correct forms of verbs to talk about past and future events – for example, night, day and yesterday

• Understand irregular past tense -  ‘broke’, ‘threw’ and ‘ate’ rather than ‘breaked’, ‘throwed’ and ‘eated"