Introduction

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classifies preschoolers from ages 3 to 5-years-old. Developmental milestones are things most children can do by certain ages. Children reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, behave, and move. By preschool, children are beginning to put all the concepts they have learned together to express themselves, their thoughts and their opinions. Children's language production and comprehension are beginning to even out to make them more effective conversationalists. Children are exposed to a plethora of language, and they give meaning to the words they hear through fast-mapping. After this rapid acquisition, slow-mapping begins where children develop lexical specificity and improve the meanings they acquired previously.

Content

Content includes factors such as semantics, including word knowledge, world knowledge, and vocabulary.

Preschool children begin to use accurate pronouns (e.g., I, you, me, we, and they) to gear language to themselves or others. During this time there is also growth in meta-knowledge language to express and acquire knowledge of how language goes together including more complex emotions (e.g., confused, embarrassed), thought processes (e.g., I know, I remember), time and temporal concepts (e.g., before, during), locational concepts (e.g., under, behind), kinship terms (e.g., grandpa, mom), relational terms (e.g., interrogatives, opposites), and deictic terms, or words that shift meaning depending on the speaker (e.g., this, that).

In terms of their vocabulary and speech sounds, preschool aged children are close to reaching mastery level for speech sounds (90% of speech sounds are adult-like and are intelligible). On average, a child uses fast mapping, or the ability to quickly encode words into memory with minimal exposure, to learn around 13,000 words by the time they enter kindergarten. Furthermore, children this age begin to understand that words can be flexible and used in various forms.

Form

Form refers to the building blocks of language such as morphology (grammar), syntax (sentences), and phonological awareness (sound awareness).

Children's language will become more complex in terms of form. Sentences produced by children in this age group may typically include 5-6 words featuring auxiliary verbs, adjectives, and embedded clauses. These sentences may also feature more complex words with comparative and superlative suffixes (e.g., -er and -est) (e.g., bigger, biggest), negatives such as (e.g., aren't doesn't), or sound modifications such as (e.g., present vs present, red head vs redhead).

Use

Use is the understanding and the ability to use language in a social context when interacting with others on a daily basis.

Children in preschool begin to ask lots of questions (e.g., "Why do I have to...") as well as begin to offer their opinions. During this time, there are also improvements in social pragmatics including turn taking (2+ exchanges) and maintaining an appropriate speaking volume. Preschool aged children start to become better at conversational repair, as they will often times ask for clarification or repetition.

In addition, children are able to tell more complex narratives including retelling a personal story, spontaneously telling a personal event, narrating an event as it occurs, and making up fictional stories (e.g., "Once upon a time...).

Cognition

In terms of overall cognition, preschool aged children will begin to accurately follow 3+ step instructions (e.g., "Put your pajamas on, brush your teeth, and then pick out a book."), independently tell the next part of a familiar story, or sustain attention for 5-10 minutes during activities (e.g., crafts; story time)

Conclusion

Preschool aged children will continue to develop in these language areas to become more effective communicators. Preschoolers are storytellers at this stage, but they can also describe how they are feeling and what they are thinking. By the time children reach kindergarten, they are generally intelligible and can have adult-like conversations. If you are concerned about the rate your child is acquiring and using language, reach out to your pediatrician!