ABSTRACT
It first becomes obvious that children are actually learning to talk some time between twelve and eighteen months of age when they begin to use single-word utterances of the following type:
juice dada biscuit there no that byebye big wassat hi shoe allgone car look dirty hot up ball
Such simple single-word utterances may look like a very primitive and rudimentary communication system. The vocabulary in the early stages is limited in range and its application is restricted to the immediate here and now. Consequently, it is hardly possible for the child to express or give shape to complex relationships, such as:
the conditional (‘if . . . , then . . .’); the temporal (‘before’ and ‘after’); notions of probability (‘might’, ‘may’, ‘could’, etc.).
