3 Years

At age three years, your child should:

• Use short sentences to announce what he or she is doing or has done
• Ask "What?" questions frequently
• Answer yes or no questions correctly
• Have a vocabulary of 900 to 1,000 words
• Give name, sex and age and be able to sing several nursery rhymes
• Use regular past tense markers (i.e., "walked," "looked")
• Use "is," "are" and "am" in sentences
• Use the following pronouns: I, me
• Begin to obey prepositional phrases like "Put the block under the chair"
• Express fatigue verbally
• Present speech that is 50 - 75% intelligible
• Produce "m, n, ng, p, f, h and w"
• Stay with an activity eight or nine minutes

At age three your child may:

• Tell a simple story, mixing real and unreal facts
• Use the following pronouns: he, she, you, me, I, mine
• Understand "yesterday," "summer," "lunchtime," '"tonight"
• Talk when playing alone
• Continue to have easy dysfluent speech

You can stimulate the speech and language development of your three-year-old by:

• Using words he or she has trouble with frequently in your speech
• Talking about similarities or differences between things
• Encouraging your child to tell stories using books and pictures
• Reading longer stories to your child
• Paying attention to your child when he or she is talking, remembering that repeating words and sounds is normal during this period of growth
• Allowing your child to play with other children

Some specific activities are:

• Talking with your child about the attributes of objects; for example, when playing with a toy car, talk about the color, the size, the sound it makes, etc.
• Singing nursery rhymes with physical movements, such as "Ring Around the Rosey"
• Exposing your child to different surroundings and the vocabulary that would be used in them; using vocabulary words to describe what is going on when: you go on a walk, go shopping, plant a garden or clean the house

If you are concerned that your child may not be developing these skills as he or she should, you may seek the advice of a speech-language pathologist.