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Michael Halliday
Seven functions of languagefor children in their early years:
*Instrumental- When the child uses language to express their needs
*regulatory-  language is used to tell others what to do
*interactional- language used to make contact and form relationships with others
*personal- language used to express feelings, opinions and individual identity
*heuristic- language used to gain knowledge about the environment
*imaginative- language used to tell stories, jokes and create imaginary environments
*representational- language used to convey facts and information.

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Hypothesised, and proved with research that children are capable of 'pluralising' nouns that they had never heard before, with the appropriate allomorph. The 'Wug test' was conducted by a professor of psycho-linguistics, Jean Berko, in order to develop theoretical understanding of children's innate ability to recognise linguistic morphology. Linguistic morphology is the study of how words are formed, and their grouping relationship under established lexicon. The children were presented with a 'wug', a nonsense noun for a small toy which they were shown on a screen. The 'wugs' were shown doing different activity, and the children were prompted 'This is a wug. Now there are two. There are two ___' to which the children responded "Wugs!".

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She suggested that expansion coupled with re-casting improves children's ability to imitate.
This theory challenges Jean Piaget and others that believe cognitive and linguistic development is independent to each other.
In Katherine Nelson’s study of 18 children's first words, she found that most of the children had words that was used in just this way before they learned 50 words. Furthermore, 6 of the children studied by Nelson had one among their first ten words. These words were mostly: naming things, action / events, personal / social and modifying things. 60% were nouns. Verbs were the second largest group. Modifiers were third. Personal and social words made up 8% of the results.

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Children adopt roles and identities when playing and make up objects and story lines.

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Professor of language and communication, Jean Aitchison, identified three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary, labelling, packaging and network building. Labelling is the recognising of sounds as referring to the object which they describe, e.g "mummy" = mother. Packaging entails understanding of a word's range of meaning, perhaps if a word has more than one place or function. Network building is understanding the relationship/connections between words; understanding that some are opposites. The concept of hypernyms and hyponyms is key: cyan, navy, and ultramarine are hyponyms of blue (which, in turn, is a hyponym of the word color).

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He created an alternative to Halliday's theory of language functions that focuses on individual utterances.

These include:
Labelling
Repeating
Answering
Requesting Action
Calling
Greeting
Protesting
Practising

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Bellugi came up with the stage of negation and the stage of pronouns. Both of these stages include 3 headings and breakdown the example used for both the negation and pronouns meaning. She found that children don't know how to use negatives at a young age, but develop it through 3 stages from 'I' to 'don't' to 'am not.'
Furthermore, with pronouns children find it difficult to mater this and therefore have to learn this in 3 stages as well.
1. Children start to use their own names.
2. Children recognise I/me pronouns, and that they are used in different places within sentences.
3. Children use them according to whether they are in the subject or object position within a sentence.

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Bard and Sachs Studied a boy called 'Jim', who was son of two deaf parents. However, he was exposed to TV and radio, his speech development was very retarded until he went sessions with a speech therapist, therefore this showed that human interaction is necessary to develop speech.