Language Development in Children

  • Birth

    Infants engage in recipricol communication with their caregivers, responding most to facial recognition and vocal cues.
  • 5 years old

    90% of language form has been acquired.
  • 3-4 months old

    Infants learn a signal-response sequences and predictable patterns through rituals and games.
  • 8-9 months old

    Infants develop intentionality through gestures accompanied by eye contact.
  • 12 months old

    The first meaningful word is expressed and sound patterns are continually being stored.
  • 18 months old

    At 18 months old, a child can produce around 50 single words and starting to combine words on the basis of word-order rules; babbling starts to decrease and new word referant associations are made in as little as three exposures.
  • 2 years old

    At 2 years old, a toddler has built a vocabulary consisting of 150-300 words and can use a greater range of grammatical structure wherein the addition of bound morphemes is at an average length of 1.6-2.2 morphemes per MLU.
  • 3 years old

    The toddler begins to express more adult like sentence structures.
  • 4 years old

    The preschooler begins to change conversation style in order to fit partner and mean length of utterance continues to increase to 3.6-4.6 morphemes.
  • 6 years old

    The child begins to learn visual communication through writing and reading.
  • Ages 7-13 years old

    In early school age years, conversational language continues to develop and narratives expand and gain all of the mature features of storytelling.
  • Ages 13-18 years old

    Adolecents discuss more topics that are not discussed at home and communicate with more affect and turn-taking.