Language Development Timeline - From Birth to 18 Years Old

By ylind

  • Birth to 3 Months Old

    The infant starts vocalizing with cooing, gurggling, sighing, and laughing.
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    Language Development of Birth to 18 Years of Age

    A child's language development and speech is an amazing process that develops early and keeps developing throughout their growing years and through adulthood.

  • 3 Months Old

    The infant responds vocally to someone who is engaging with him/her.

  • 4 Months Old

    The infants vocals begin to change as they start using them for vocal play.

  • 6 or 7 Months Old

    Child starts to babble, and this babble can start to resemble words, "mamama".

  • 8 Months Old

    The infant begins gesturing.

  • 9 to 12 Months Old

    Babbling starts to resemble or mimic adult words or speech.

  • One Year Old

    First words are spoken, and other words are filled in with hand gestures.

  • 18 to 24 Months Old

    The child begins combining words on the basis of word-order rules and starts answering questions; such as, "Do you want some water?" "Are you Hungry?" and the response would be "Yes" or "No".

  • Two Years Old

    The toddler begins adding bound morphemes, uses "Please", and talks about things that are wrong or missing; such as, "Where daddy?" "Milk gone."

  • Three Years Old

    Adult-like sentences begin with a subject and a verb and "Why" questions.

  • Four Years Old

    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 of numbers and counting emerge.

  • Five to Seven Years Old

    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 (high point), and an end (resolution).

  • Six Years Old

    The child begins to learn visual mode of communication with writing and reading.

  • Seven to Nine Years Old

    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 Old

    The child understands common idioms and can acquire information from written texts.

  • Twelve to Fourteen Years Old

    Child is able to give abstract dictionary definitions for words and can explain meaning of proverbs in content.

  • Fifteen to Eighteen Years Old

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