A have some young kids at home and our youngest son is leaving the toddler phase with some speed. His language still is quite rudimentary (to say the least). This research shows that toddlers’ speech is far more advanced than previously understood.  Dr Cristina Dye, a lecturer in child language development, found that two to three- year-olds are using grammar far sooner than expected. She studied fifty French speaking youngsters aged between 23 and 37 months, capturing tens of thousands of their utterances.

From the press release:

Dr Dye, who carried out the research while at Cornell University in the United States, found that the children were using ‘little words’ which form the skeleton of sentences such as a, an, can, is, an, far sooner than previously thought.

Dr Dye and her team used advanced recording technology including highly sensitive hidden microphones placed close to the children, to capture the precise sounds the children voiced. They spent years painstakingly analysing every minute sound made by the toddlers and the context in which it was produced.

They found a clear, yet previously undetected, pattern of sounds and puffs of air, which consistently replaced grammatical words in many of the children’s utterances.

Dr Dye said: “Many of the toddlers we studied made a small sound, a soft breath, or a pause, at exactly the place that a grammatical word would normally be uttered.”

“The fact that this sound was always produced in the correct place in the sentence leads us to believe that young children are knowledgeable of grammatical words. They are far more sophisticated in their grammatical competence than we ever understood.

“Despite the fact the toddlers we studied were acquiring French, our findings are expected to extend to other languages. I believe we should give toddlers more credit — they’re much more amazing than we realised.”

For decades the prevailing view among developmental specialists has been that children’s early word combinations are devoid of any grammatical words. On this view, Cchildren then undergo a ‘tadpole to frog’ transformation where due to an unknown mechanism; , they start to develop grammar in their speech. Dye’s results now challenge the old view.

Dr Dye said: “The research sheds light on a really important part of a child’s development. Language is one of the things that makes us human and understanding how we acquire it shows just how amazing children are.

“There are also implications for understanding language delay in children. When children don’t learn to speak normally it can lead to serious issues later in life. For example, those who have it are more likely to suffer from mental illness or be unemployed later in life. If we can understand what is ‘normal’ as early as possible then we can intervene sooner to help those children.”

BTW, if you want some more research on communication by infants:

• Infants express non-verbal sympathy for others in distress.
• Giving children non-verbal clues about words boosts vocabularies.

Abstract of the research:

Since early studies in language development, scholars have noticed that function words, in particular auxiliaries, often appear to be missing in early speech, with the result that child utterances sometimes exhibit verbs with non-finite morphology in seemingly matrix clauses. This has led to the idea of a ‘deficit’ in the child’s syntactic representations. In contrast with previous studies, this article explores the possibility that the child’s phonology may considerably impact her overt realization of auxiliaries. Specifically, it examines the hypothesis that non-finite verbs in early speech are in fact attempted periphrastics (i.e. auxiliary/modal+non-finite verb) in which the auxiliaries are just reduced phonetically, often to the point where they remain unpronounced. We studied 28 normally developing French-speaking children aged between 23 and 37 months. New observational data uncovered a continuum in a given child’s phonetic realizations of auxiliaries. Children showed various levels of auxiliary reduction, suggesting that their non-finite verbs are best analyzed as being part of periphrastics involving an auxiliary form that represents the endpoint on this continuum, i.e. is (completely) deleted. Further examination of these verbs revealed that their semantics corresponds to the semantics of adult periphrastics. Additionally, the results of an experiment where children imitated sentences with either periphrastic or synthetic verbs showed that responses with non-finite verbs were predominantly produced when the target sentence involved a periphrastic, rather than a synthetic verb.