Focus on meaning
Even older children have to work out some puzzles, for example, when familiar language is used in unfamiliar ways, as in the example below. When David (5 years, 1 month) was at his older sister’s birthday party, toasts were proposed with grape juice in stemmed glasses:
Father I’d like to propose a toasts.
Several minutes later, David raised his glass:
David I’d like to propose a piece of bread.
Only when laughter sent David slinking from the table did the group realize that he wasn’t intentionally making a play on word! He was concentrating so hard on performing the fascinating new gesture and the formulaic expression ‘I’d like to propose…’ that he failed to realize that the word he thought he knew-‘toasts’-was not the same toast and could not be replaced with its apparent near-synonym, ‘a piece of bread’.
Question formation
Randall (2 years, 9 months) asked the following questions in various situations over the cause of a day.
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?
Randall had concluded that the trick of asking question was to put ‘are’ at the beginning of the sentence. His questions are good examples of Stage 3 in question development.