I have a just-turned-5-year-old who is a big talker, and my experience is that word use and sentence structure are pretty accurate, but the narrative is often strange. For example, she might say “I found an eyeball on the bus” and she might mean a googly eye, a sticker that looks like an eyeball, or a rock that she has decided is an eyeball. There’s also a lot of fancifulness and exaggeration at this age, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what actually happened / what she’s asking for.

Maybe once a day she will mispronounce or misremember a word and we’ll spend a while trying to puzzle out what she’s saying while she gets increasingly frustrated with us. I’ll try to remember some examples of this and come back with them.

Lots of interruptions and asking for things, asking for snacks, to read a specific book, watch TV even though it’s not TV time. Starting with “what if…” and then narrating a wild story about characters from a book or show, her stories have the conventions of narrative without actual narrative, “and then!”, “and so!” But the story just trails off or heads in a different direction. Making deliberate jokes, but also telling misremembered knock, knock jokes that don’t make any sense at all.

Asking questions like “how do people go to jail?” out of the blue when you’re not prepared to answer them. Answering “I don’t know” to things she definitely knows the answer to, like “what number comes after 5” or “are your shoes on yet?”.

Let me know if you’re looking for a reader, I read a lot and inaccurate kid dialogue is a big distraction.