Language Development from birth to 18 years of age

  • Birth to 3 months

    The infant starts vocalizing with cooing, gurgling, sighing and laughing
  • 3 months

    The infant responds vocally to someone who is engaging with them
  • 6 or 7 months

    Child starts to babble, and this babble can start to resemble words, mama
  • 9 to 12 months

    Babbling starts to resemble or mimic adult words or speech
  • One Year

    First words are spoken, and other words are filled in with hand gestures
  • 18 to 24 months

    The child begins combining words on the basis or words-order rules and starts answering yes or no questions.
  • Two Years

    The toddler begins adding bounds morphemes, uses "please" and talk about things that are wrong or missing
  • Three years

    Adult-like sentences begin with a subject and a verb and why questions
  • Four years

    Able to carry on a conversation which can include past events, reasoning, predicting expressing empathy, and creating imaginary roles, and knowledge of letter names and sounds and recognition or numbers and counting emerge.
  • Five to Seven years

    Ninety percent of language is formed and child begins to tell narratives that are true stories that shows a central focus with a beginning, middle and an end.
  • Six Years

    The child begins to learn visual mode of communication with writing and reading
  • Seven to Nine years

    Language is used to establish and maintain social status, begins to understand jokes and riddles based on sound similarities, starts defining terms and giving background information, and stories are become more developed with characters' goals, motivations, and reactions, and understanding of multiple meanings of words.
  • Nine to Twelve years

    The child understands common idioms and can acquire information from written texts.
  • Twelve to Fourteen year

    Child is able to give abstract dictionary definition for words and can explain meaning of proverbs in content
  • Fifteen to Eighteen years

    The average vocabulary of high school graduate in 10,000 words and written language is more complex than spoken language.