the baby starts to make speech sounds. At around two months, the baby engages in cooing, which mostly consists of vowel sounds. At around four to six months, cooing turns into babbling, which is the repetitive consonant-vowel combinations. Babies understand more than they are able to say. In this 0–8 months range, the child is engaged in vocal play of vegetative sounds, laughing, and cooing. Once the child hits the 8–12 month, range the child engages in canonical babbling, i.e. dada as well as variegated babbling. This jargon babbling with intonational contours the language being learned. From 12–24 months, babies can recognize the correct pronunciation of familiar words. Babies also use phonological strategies to simplify word pronunciation. Some strategies include repeating the first consonant-vowel in a multisyllable word ('TV' → 'didi') or deleting unstressed syllables in a multisyllable word ('banana' → 'nana'). Within this first year, two word utterances and two syllable words emerge. This period is often called the holophrastic stage of development, because one word conveys as much meaning as an entire phrase. For instance, the simple word "milk" can imply that the child is requesting milk, noting spilled milk, sees a cat drinking milk, etc. One study found that children at this age were capable of comprehending 2-word sentences, producing 2–3 word sentences, and naming basic colors. By 24–30 months awareness of rhyme emerges as well as rising intonation. One study concludes that children between the ages of 24–30 months typically can produce 3–4 word sentence, create a story when prompted by pictures, and at least 50% of their speech is intelligible. By 36–60 months, phonological awareness continues to improve as well as pronunciation. At this age, children have a considerable experience with language and are able to form simple sentences that are 3 words in length. They use basic prepositions, pronouns, and plurals. They become immensely creative in their language use and learn to categorize items such as recognizing that a shoe is not a fruit. At this age, children also learn to ask questions and negate sentences to develop these questions. Over time, their syntax gets more and more unique and complex. A study reveals that at this age, a child's speech should be at least 75% intelligible. By 6–10 years, children can master syllable stress patterns, which helps distinguish slight differences between similar words. Semantic development The average child masters about fifty words by