Telegraphic Speech
'Telegraphic Speech' is a phenomenon first documented by Roger Brown and his colleagues in the early 1960s. The phenomenon of omitting words that have grammatical function is now well documented among toddlers learning to speak in many languages. Exactly which words toddlers omit and why they omit them remain active areas of research. Presently, the consensus view is that children initially produce phrases and sentences with nouns, verbs and adjectives (open class words) but drop out auxiliaries, determiners, etc. (closed class words). Toddlers prefer open class words, because nouns, verbs and adjectives ‘refer’, whereas closed class words generally do not. In other words, nouns, verbs and adjectives point to people, objects, events and qualities that exist in the world. In contrast, closed class words and morphemes signal elements of syntactic organization, pointing to nothing in the world. The patterns created in telegraphic speech may give insight into the nature of grammatical development and why some children's language development is delayed.