Toddler's knowledge of grammar increases at 24 months

Toddler's early grammar skills are not inherent but learned, research has found. Children's ability to understand basic grammar early in language development has puzzled researchers for a long time, who were unsure if the skill is innate or learned over time. But research involving child speech patterns has revealed that grammatical knowledge is learned gradually with a significant increase at the age of 24 months. Previous research on children's speech has shown that the use articles such as'a' and'the' early and mostly in a correct way, but the researchers said its difficult to sort out whether children are just imitating adults or if they actually understand that articles should be used before nouns such as'dog' or'shoe' Baby talk is not just a way of engaging with infant on a social level – it has important implications for language learning from the very first moments of a newborn's life. Features of baby talk present infants with information about their ambient language, and allow them to break up the speech stream into smaller chunks.