3 Telegraphic speech
Somewhere between 24 and 30 months of age, as children begin to experiment with longer and longer utterances, their speech often takes on a telegraphic style (Nelson, 1973), as you can see in Table X. These utterances are characterised by the inclusion of content words – nouns, verbs and adjectives – and the omission of function words and grammatical morphemes, such as articles (e.g. a, the), auxiliaries or modals (e.g. be, is, can), prepositions (e.g. on, in) and morphemes (e.g. -ing, -ed, -s).
| Polish | |
|---|---|
| Utterances | Intended meaning |
| ‘Mamy/rączkę tutaj’ | Namalujmy tutaj rączkę mamy |
| ‘Mother’s/hand here’ | Let us paint mother’s hand here |
| ‘W czajniczku/woda’ | W czajniczku jest woda |
| ‘In the kettle/water’ | There is water in the kettle |
| ‘Tam/obrazki dwa’ | Tam są dwa obrazki |
| ‘There/two pictures’ | There are two pictures there |
| ‘Brzuszek/nie boli’ | Nie boli mnie brzuszek |
| ‘Tummy/does not ache’ | I have not got a stomach-ache |
| English | |
| Utterances | Intended meaning |
| ‘Shoes/too big’ | The shoes are too big |
| ‘I find/no Rosie’ | I have not found Rosie |
| ‘Ella/fix it’ | Ella is fixing it |
| ‘Ella/suck her thumb’ | Ella is sucking her thumb |
| ‘Ice-cube/in the soup?’ | Did you put the ice-cube into the soup? |
The omission of function words suggests children implicitly treat these elements as contributing less meaning to the utterance than content words, and so they can be dropped. In the old-fashioned form of communication that gives its name to this stage – the telegram – the sender would pay by the word to have a message telegraphed to another office and delivered to the addressee on paper. With this imposed cost, the result was that many senders, like children, chose only to include the bare minimum to communicate the gist of the message. Although children are presumably less deliberate in their strategy to omit words than adults, the underlying drive for efficiency may be the same.
The risk is, however, that by leaving more and more words out, it is increasingly likely that the message is misunderstood. Thus, the burden of understanding is shifted onto the listener who must draw on a range of linguistic and contextual cues to work out what is being said. Most of the time, for children this ‘listener’ means a competent adult. For example, when a Polish-learning child, Zuzia (1 year, 11 months), was drawing with a crayon, she said Zuzia złamała ‘Zuzia broke’, which was intended to mean ‘Zuzia złamała kredkę’ ‘Zuzia broke the crayon’ (Konieczna, 2014). She was able to communicate the action performed on the object, not the object itself, which was obvious from the situational context to a competent adult speaker and therefore could be left unsaid.