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Age: Zero to Three Months
You wanted me? Within the first three months after birth, an infant can respond with eye contact or vocalization when a caregiver tries to get his or her attention (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011). -
Age: Two Weeks
You're not my mommy! By the second week after birth, infants have learned to distinguish between those who care for them and strangers. The infant knows who to look to for communications cues (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011). -
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Age: Three to Four Months
Hungry! Between three and four months after birth, an infant can recognize that his or her interactions with caregivers "unfold in predictable ways" (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011, p. 107). For instance, the infant knows that when he or she makes a certain noise, the caregiver will bring food. The inverse of this is, of course, that the caregiver recognizes the baby's "hungry" sound. -
Age: One Year
"Mama!" It is the infant's first birthday, and the entire year previous has been spent with the infant acquiring the "perceptual framework for learning words" (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011, p. 107), culminating in the infant's first meaningful word. -
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Age: Eighteen Months to Two Years
I can talk! About eighteen months after birth, the child can directly understand and use about fifty single words. A few months later, he or she is using three or four of them in combination. The longer the "sentences," the fewer instances of infant-like babbling. By age two, the child's vocabulary has grown 3-6 times, and he or she is using a differing number of grammatical structures (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011). -
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Age: Three to Four Years
Stories and Refinement Children in the pre-school age range of three to four years often find it easier to change subjects instead of continuing old topics of conversation. They have also begun to consider that whoever is listening to them needs to know certain bits of information; they also consider how much information their audience needs to know, as well as that they should change how they talk to younger kids compared to adults (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011). -
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Age: Five to Ten Years
Time for school! When they begin school, children learn to read and write. This allows them to develop "metalinguistic skills," which are skills that allow them to consider and make judgments about the correctness of their language. They also learn "verbal constructs" to talk about language (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011, p. 113). In the next few years, children's language development slows, kids learn more complex forms and "subtle linguistic uses" (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011, p. 114). -
Age: Six Years (First Grade)
Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. By first grade, a child can express himself or herself with about 2,600 words in working vocabulary and can understand about 8,000 root words, which expands to include about 6,000 more derivatives of those roots (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2001). This expansion of both working and understood vocabulary makes it easier for the child to understand--and to be understood by--those with whom he or she communicates. -
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Age: 11-18 Years (Adolescence)
"Whazzup?" Adolescents use slang among their friends and classmates, distinguishing themselves from not only younger children but adults as well (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011). Definitions for words become more "dictionary-like," and multiple meanings for the same words are also acquired during these years (Owens, Metz & Farinella, 2011, p. 114-115). -
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Age: Fourteen to Seventeen Years (High School)
Verbosity By the end of high school, a child's working vocabulary has expanded to about 60,000 words.