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How to Support Your Child's Language Development
From Four to Five Years of Age
What can you expect your child to do?
Children at this age produce sentences and questions using grammar that is much like that of adults. Typically, a child:
Pays attention to short stories and can tell you what happened in them.
Understands most of what people say to him or her and can string together ideas to tell of an event that happened or to tell a story.
Says about 200-300 different words, and his or her sentences may be 8 or more words long.
Names items in a category such as animals, vehicles.
Answers simple "why" questions.
Speaks clearly enough for most adults to understand (even though many children still do not pronounce certain sounds correctly, such as /s/, /r/, /l/, /v/, /ch/, sh/, /th/, and /z/, at this age).
What can you do to encourage language development?
You can continue to help your child with his or her language development in many of the same ways you used when he or she was younger, but in slightly more sophisticated ways.
Continue to use and define new words and use them in clear contexts to help your child build vocabulary. Encourage your child to ask for more information if he or she does not understand something that is said.
Continue with sorting games, but with increasingly subtle differences (things that are big vs. small, things that are smooth vs. rough), and ask your child to explain why certain items don't belong in groups.
Encourage your child to tell stories and to play roles in acting out stories and scenarios that you have read or that he or she makes up.
Continue to read stories and ask your child to guess what is going to happen next in a story. Have your child draw a picture of something that happened in the story and explain it to you.
Play age-appropriate board games and talk about turn-taking and how you play the game.
When should you worry?
At this age, when your child may be playing often with children around his or her own age or may be attending preschool classes, you are likely to be comparing your child to peers or to siblings when they were that age. Remember that children can vary in their rates of development, so this child may be faster or slower than a sibling was at the same age. However, if you are concerned that your child is not able to communicate at about the same level as his or her peers, or if your child is showing frustration with an inability to communicate, consult a professional.
For a checklist of activities you can use to determine whether your child is developing on schedule, see Additional Resources.
How to Support Your Child's Language Development
During the First Year of Life
From One to Two Years of Age
From Two to Three Years of Age
From Three to Four Years of Age
» From Four to Five Years of Age
Bilingual Language Development
Additional Resources
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