The coding system

The way children come to attach meanings to sounds, to evolve symbols in the form of lexemes and then to combine these to express rudimentary propositions, is of course only one component of learning to mean. Very young children are capable of communicating far richer ideas than is indicated by their impotence in terms of such purely grammatical resources as syntax, semantics, and morphology. It is certainly the case that children in their second year do a good deal more than simply “label” entities and activities. At the same time that children are introduced to a speech community's shared meanings for words, they come to recognize that words can be used in different ways on different occasions, that utterances can be interpreted as assertions, requests, protests and so on.

Yet it is certainly not the case that young children seek to communicate a message every time they speak. Nor is it the case that children succeed in conveying a message every time they attempt to do so. Moreover, the intention to convey a message and success in conveying a message are not intrinsically correlated with the degree of the child's linguistic competence: a pre-verbal child may employ a reaching gesture to convey desire for some object; a verbal child may produce utterances too vague to achieve their goal or may use multi-word phrases in a soliloquy that is void of communicative intent.