Language Development Timeline

By Michael Casey

  • Birth

    I was born a healthy boy. No complications or malformations were found at birth.

  • 3 Months

    I began responding to external stimuli with crude speech in the form of screams, squeals, laughter.

  • 8 Months

    I began combining my crude speech with gestures to get what I wanted.

  • 12 Months

    I began saying words such as "mama" and "dada", which means I had begun piecing together objects in my world in actual words.

  • 2 Years

    At this point, I am speaking in two word sentences. I would ask my mother for "more milk" or "choca milk". Gestures are used less frequently, but babble is more prevalent. Although I can hear different morphemes, I can't pronounce them yet.

  • 3 Years

    I begin using past tense and plural in speech, although irregular forms are still an unknown. Sentence structure is more adult-like, but still more "concrete" than a developed adults.

  • 4 Years

    My speech is becoming more and more conversational. I develop a new relationship with my older brother through interaction and self-correction.

  • 5 Years

    I am placed in a day care program at church. A more complex social environment accompanies the maturation of my speech. Social interactions come with rules, and speech adapts to new environment.

  • 6 Years

    I begin kindergarten. Speech is paired with reading and writing, which brings a more formal understanding of my native language.

  • Adolescence

    I have entered middle school. I have a formal understanding of my own language. I use different styles of speech depending on who I am speaking to. At this point, speech is a means of communicating who I am as an individual.