The period from two to three years of age is a crucial time for a toddler's speech development. However, while much of what they say may not be understood by others yet, researchers have discovered that at this age, a child's speech is much more advanced than previously thought.

The researchers studied 50 French speaking toddlers aged between 23 and 37 months. They used advanced recording equipment, including highly sensitive microphones, to capture the exact sounds that children make. Tens of thousands of sounds were recorded and these were then analysed over a number of years.

According to lead researcher and expert in child language development, Dr Christina Dye, children appear to be using grammar much earlier than expected. The researchers found a clear pattern of sounds and puffs of air, which continually replaced grammatical words in what the children said. These sounds, such as ‘a', ‘an', ‘can' and ‘is' had never been detected in children this young before.

"Many of the toddlers we studied made a small sound, a soft breath, or a pause, at exactly the place that a grammatical word would normally be uttered.

"The fact that this sound was always produced in the correct place in the sentence leads us to believe that young children are knowledgeable of grammatical words. They are far more sophisticated in their grammatical competence than we ever understood," Dr Dye explained.

She noted that while the children in this study were French speakers, the results ‘are expected to extend to other languages'

Until now, it was thought that children's early speech development did not contain any grammatical words. As a result of these findings, Dr Dye insisted that toddlers should be given more credit as they are ‘much more amazing than we realised'.

She emphasised the importance of this study because language ‘is one of the things that makes us human and understanding how we acquire it shows just how amazing children are'.

"There are also implications for understanding language delay in children. When children don't learn to speak normally it can lead to serious issues later in life. For example, those who have it are more likely to suffer from mental illness or be unemployed later in life. If we can understand what is ‘normal' as early as possible then we can intervene sooner to help those children," Dr Dye added.

Details of these findings are published in the Journal of Linguistics.