Language Development: 4-5

27 October 2010

By Raising Children Network

• At four, use around 1500 different words but understand even more. By five, he will have a vast vocabulary of words that he is able to understand and use
• By five, understand and use words that explain when things occur, such as ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘next week’, but he may still have trouble understanding complicated ideas such as ‘at the same time’
• Begin to learn and use more connecting words (when, but), words that explain complicated emotions (confused, upset, delighted) and things going on in his brain (don’t know, remember). He learns more and more adjectives that let him explain things more precisely
• Speak in increasingly complex sentences by joining small sentences together to form longer ones and using sentences in different ways. For example, he is able to say both ‘the dog was chasing the cat’ and ‘the cat was chased by the dog’ to mean the same thing. By five, your preschooler will be able to imitate long sentences of up to nine words
• Develop the ability to discuss things that have happened in the past, rather than just things that are currently happening. He will also get better at using the past tense (went, ran) and plurals (shelves, children)
• Improve his storytelling, although he might still give too much or not enough information, and might have trouble telling things in order and making it clear to the listener who is being spoken about
• Have greater appreciation of others’ perspectives, so he might add more useful background information in conversation – for example, ‘I went to Mark’s and we had cake and Mark is from my preschool’
• Get better at taking turns in conversations with a group of people
• By age four and a half or five, speak so that virtually every word said can be understood by strangers. He may still have difficulty using some speech sounds, such as saying ‘fing’ for ‘thing’ or ‘den’ for ‘then’, and pronouncing some complex words, such as ‘rhinoceros’, ‘ambulance’, ‘spaghetti’
• Begin to understand figures of speech, such as ‘you’re pulling my leg’ and ‘he’s a couch potato’
• Follow directions with more than two steps, even if the situation is a new one. For example, ‘Give your ticket to the man over there, and he’ll stamp it, and then we can go through the turnstile’. However, he might ignore words that tell him the order in which he should carry out the steps – for example, ignoring the word ‘before’ in the sentence, ‘Before you go through the turnstile, give your ticket to the man’
• Make requests more politely, using words such as ‘may’, ‘can’, ‘would’ and ‘could’
• Begin to use language to tease and tell jokes
• Start talking at the right volume for the situation.