What characterizes the third stage of first-language acquisition?

The third stage of first-language acquisition is characterized by the emergence of minimal sentences that exhibit simple semantic relations. During this stage, children begin to combine words to form basic phrases and sentences, moving beyond single words. These constructions typically reflect a rudimentary understanding of how words relate to each other in conveying meaning.

For example, a child might say "want cookie" or "more juice" to express desires or needs, indicating a growing grasp of sentence structure and the relationship between subjects, verbs, and objects. This stage shows significant progress in language development, as children start to use their growing vocabulary to generate more intricate expressions of thought, though still without the complexity of grammatical structures seen in later stages.

While other options touch on different phases of language development, they do not accurately represent this specific stage, where the focus shifts from single-word vocabulary to the construction of simple sentences with semantic meaning.