Anyone who has taken care of an infant or toddler knows that their development is not a straight-line graph. New skills solidify over a few days, even though the child has been working up to them for weeks or months.
I was reminded of this again when ABC, who turned two earlier this month, returned home from several days away with her mom and aunt. She is suddenly speaking most often in full sentences. She had been using an occasional short sentence, but now she is making longer sentences and using them to explain things or ask for things.
Except when she says, “No!”
That’s a one-word sentence all on its own.
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Top of JC's Mind 
very clear at any age
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True!
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Great. Ususally between 2-3, syntax is already being developed, and it appears that combinations of function and content words document this. You may have been hearing something like “no”, a function word, combined with “eat”, “nap”, content words, to make a sentence “I don’t want a nap, eat, etc.” They begin to decontruct the lexicon into these subcategories and use them syntactically in combinations around this age. I remember one of our kid’s function words was actually a combination of two words: “all done”, which could be used with anything else to mean “stop” doing whatever you were trying to make him do.
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Thanks, Stan. Nice to have the linguistics background.
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My oldest grandson’s jump in swimming ability really hit me. He went to “swim camp” for a week and next time we saw him, he was scooting across the pool. It’s a true testament to how quickly they learn.
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I know we went through these stages with our daughters, but that was a long time ago, so it is a re-discovery with our granddaughter.
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