During these years the child begins:
- to change the meaning of words by adding suffixes (e.g., big/bigger, tall/tallest, play/player), but will still struggle to produce the correct form (e.g, She is more shorter than me);
- to use tag questions, e.g., I'm going for a swim, OK?
The child will continue to have difficulty in mastering:
- subject-verb agreement e.g., The ducks is eating my sandwich, All the ducks is eating my sandwich. (although this can be a variation as well as developmental feature);
- irregular forms of the past tense e.g, slept, ran;
- contractible copulas e.g, he's tall, she's pretty;
- uncontractible auxillaries e.g., I was (cf. I'm);
- regular and irregular forms of the third person singular, e.g., I do, you do, she does;
- negative forms of the past tense e.g., He wasn't a naughty boy;
- negative modals e.g, couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't;
- the different uses of definite and indefinite articles;
- understanding passive sentences e.g., The cat was chased by the dog;
- responding to alternatives, e.g,
Mum: Do you want peanut paste or Vegemite?
Child: Yep!
The child will begin:
- to embed clauses using who, which, what or that e.g., The dog that bit me lived here. (These may still be confused and variation also occurs with this form e.g., The man what fixes the glass);
- to produce more elaborate utterances with multiple embedded sentences, e.g., I think I want to go to the park with my friend who lives next door;
- to vary the use of conjunctions to show relationships by adding information, marking time, showing causal relationships, but, will still use because, and and then as if they mean the same thing. The most commonly used conjunction remains the word and (Just listen to Year Ones telling news!);
- to develop sequential narrative structures;
- to become even more social in conversational exchanges and more aware of conversational difficulties;
- to initiate and sustain conversations, although some pre-school children struggle with talking to more than one person;
- to develop the rules of 'interrupting';
- to make indirect requests, but still favour direct requests;
- to express spatial and temporal relationships e.g., in, on, under, over and before, after, during, since.