A three-year-old child

• Uses language as the main means of communicating
• Takes a number of turns in conversation
• Initiates conversations and increasingly able to maintain topic of conversation
• Imagination evident in play e.g. produces imaginary cat from pocket for adult to stroke, says the cat is hungry
• Enacts less familiar events in play e.g. visit to dentist, zoo
• Becomes involved in sustained make-believe play with peers
• Able to shift focus of attention from activity engaged in to verbal direction and back to activity, but needs adult support to do so
• Uses strategy of offering explanation for questions not understood
• Understands all common action words, object names, most common adjectives
• Understands ‘Who?’, ‘Whose?’, ‘Why?’ and occasionally ‘How many?’
• Follows instructions containing three, sometimes four key words e.g. ‘Find the big beaker and put it in Johnny’s bag.’
• Understands many words referring to basic concepts e.g. in, on, under, big, small, long, short, Expressive vocabulary on average consists of 700 words
• Asks questions using ‘Why?’
• Talks increasingly about the past and future; tells short, often disjointed, stories
• Speech is mostly understandable with some continuing immaturities
• Uses grammatical structures:
• pronouns I, he, she, you, they, we
• verbs can, will, is, are
• verb endings pushed, stopped
• negatives mid sentence I not like it
• articles a, the
• conjunctions and, because