Word of the Week: Telegraphic speech

Telegraphic speech is a way of speaking that does not include grammatical morphemes. Grammatical morphemes are the small units of language that add meaning to words and sentences, like the past tense marker -ed, the plural -s, or prepositions like in and on. An example of a telegraphic utterance would be “Mommy feed baby” to express “Mommy’s feeding the baby.”

Children use telegraphic speech during the two-word stage of language development. When adults use it, they strip grammatical morphemes from sentences to simplify their language.

Adults tend to use telegraphic speech with children because we think it will be easier to understand. We use simplified language in order to match the level of the child we’re talking to. Sometimes, it can be beneficial for emphasizing the sound of the words we say. Generally, though, it is agreed upon that using telegraphic speech isn’t as helpful as we initially believe.

Children do not seem to understand adult speech more readily when grammatical morphemes are absent. In reality, they rely on cues that these functional words provide to develop their grammar skills. After all, these morphemes include valuable information about the meaning of the sentence. This illustrates that high quality input is incredibly important to language development.

In fact, building on children’s speech to add these units of grammar is one technique to support language development. So don’t shy away from speaking in full sentences to your toddler. It’s one of the ways that they learn!