36-48 Months

Normal Language Acquisition Milestones for children starting at 36 months (three years) old to 48 months (four years) old

Starting at 36 months old, the child is now beginning to develop shallow phonological abilities.
At 40 months, they are continuing to refine articulatory skills.
At 44 months, the child has mastered most consonants.
At 48 months, they are decreasing their use of phonological processes such as weak-syllable deletion and cluster reduction.

(Speech Milestones)

(Textbook)

At 36 months old, the child is now using four to five words in sentences and they are also using compound sentences with "and."
At 40 months, they are using pronouns consistently and use adverbs of time
At 44 months, the child is using articles, past tense consistently, and uses contractions consistently.
At 48 months, the are now combining four to seven words in sentences. They are also using contractible auxiliaries and uncontractible auxiliaries. Additionally, the child is also using irregular third person verbs such as "has."

(Language Milestones)

(Textbook)

At 36 months, the child is using pronouns such as they, them, and us. They are also continuing to use fast mapping to learn and understand new words. (Textbook)
At 40 months, they can now use between 1,000-1,500 words and also can comprehend 1,500-2,000 words. They are also understanding some relational terms like hard-soft. (Textbook)
At 44 months old, the child understands some kinship terms. They can also use syntactic information to narrow the possible meanings of new words. (Textbook)
At 48 months, they are now overextending new words on the basis of object function. They also use animacy information to infer the meanings of new words. Reflexive pronouns are being used as well such as himself, herself, and itself. (Textbook)
At 4 years old, the child can describe object functions, describe differences and similarities, can determine antonyms and synonyms. They can also identify things that go together from a group of items and can describe an object using 3 or more adjectives. (Semantic Development Milestones)

(Language Milestones)

(Textbook, Semantic Development Milestones)

At 36 months, the child begins to engage in longer dialogues. (Textbook)
At 40 months, they are beginning to use primitive narratives and begin to make conversational repairs. (Textbook)
At 44 months, the child understands indirect requests accompanied by nonverbal pointing. (Textbook, RR)
At 48 months, they are using interpretive, logical, participatory, and organizing functions. They also construct true narratives. (Textbook, RR)

(Language Milestones)

(Textbook, RR)

Between the ages of 3-4, the child will enjoy listening to and talking about storybooks, understand that print carries a message, make attempts to read and write, identify familiar signs and labels, participate in rhyming games, identify some letters and make some letter-sound matches, use known letters (or their best attempt to write the letters) to represent written language especially for meaningful words like their names or phrases such as "I love you"
They may begin to try non-fiction books, some longer stories, and keep mixing in the rhyming books at this age to promote growth
The child will begin learning about tracking the sequence of stories. They can learn this by telling stories, retelling stories, or using props like puppets.
Continue to keep it a positive environment to encourage a love of reading.
At this age, they will also know the correct way to hold and handle a book, understand that words are read from left to right and pages are read from top to bottom, and start noticing words that rhyme
They will recognize about half the letters of the alphabet and start matching letter sounds to letters (like knowing b makes a /b/ sound). They may start to recognize their name in print and other often-seen words, like those on signs and logos

Preliteracy skills are a building block of Language Milestones

(home-speech-home.com, northeastohioparent.com, understood.com, eugene.libguides.com)

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