Language in the two-year old

Two stages in the vocabulary development of two-year-olds are reported. In the earlier Receptive stage, the child says many fewer nouns than he understands and says no verbs at all although he understands many. The child then begins to close the comprehension/production gap, entering a Productive stage in which he says virtually all the nouns he understands plus his first verbs. Frequency and length of word combinations correlate with these vocabulary stages.