ABSTRACT
The words the nursery age child is beginning to use reveal the quality and depth of his thinking. The child’s play with toys is accompanied by play with ideas, which are expressed in experimenting with communicating by talking. Young children often construe words in a rather literal manner as in the example of the shampoo, where the sound “poo” was linked immediately to a specific part of the body, “bums”. The discovery of language at this age seems to be linked to bodily experiences, as if there is a pleasure in words which adds to the experience and captures the thrills and sensations of the bodily pleasure. Young children have antennae; their grasp of language and their limited vocabulary perhaps heightens their sensitivity and emotional closeness to phenomena from which older children can maintain more of a distance. The child is confronting, often for the first time the experiences of loss and death.
