Year 0-1   Year 1-2   Year 2-3   Year 3-4

Maximilian and Zoe are 2 years and 3 months old
Maximilian and Zoe are 2 years and 3 months old

Here I describe the general flow of Maximilian and Zoe’s language skills development, and how their languages are mastered chronologically. I am analysing their language milestones, such as new sounds that they are working on, new intonations that we observe in their speech, new grammar structures that they have added to their repertoire, and, of course, new words that they actively use.

The development of the phonological skills is crucial during year 0-1. I scrutinise the change in the children’s melody in the detailed analysis.

Year 1-2 is when Maximilian and Zoe’s vocabularies explode in a most fascinating way. In the detailed analysis of this year’s language development, I look at when different words are actively used by the children and how they are pronounced. For that reason, transcription is given for the “mispronounced” words.

Year 2-3 is marked by a further expansion of vocabularies, but the development of the sentence-building skills is what is most exciting at this stage. Max and Zoe easily adopt conversational formulae as well as experiment with grammar, for example, with declensions and different verb forms. Starting from this year, I do not provide a detailed analysis with transcriptions as the children’s speech gets consistently clearer from the point of view of pronunciation.

Year 3-4 sees a breakthrough in the children’s letter-recognition skills. Max’ spontaneous curiosity about symbols of all kinds results in his learning to read and write when he turns four. Zoë’s extrovert and empathetic personality helps her to become adept at Russian-Swedish code-switching.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: