Which stage of early language development is characterized by telegraphic speech such as 'See plane go!'

• A. Prelinguistic stage
• B. Pragmatic language stage
• C. Telegraphic phase
• D. Full sentences stage

Answer: (C)

The concept here is telegraphic speech, the early language stage where children mix a few content words into short, sentence-like utterances and drop function words and small grammatical morphemes. The example “See plane go!” embodies this pattern: it conveys a clear message using only essential content words, with no articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, or other function words. This compact style is typical around the time a toddler moves from single words toward simple multiword phrases, roughly in the 2-year range. Later stages feature longer, more grammatical sentences, and prior stages involve nonword-like vocalizations (prelinguistic) or social use of language (pragmatic) rather than concise, content-word-only speech.