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Birth
Child begins to receive information through caregiver and parent interaction. Process of learning to communicate has already begun. -
Infant - 3 Months
Children respond vocally to conversation partners through noise and babbling. Facial recognition. -
Infant - 8 Months
Child begins gesturing to communicate. Points at objects and individuals. Understands basic communication patterns and turn-taking. -
Infant - 12 Months
Child begins to speak first words. Words accompany previous gestures such as "cat" while pointing to a pet cat and "mama" when seeing the mother. -
Infant - 18 Months
Child begins combining words, such as "that cat" and "puppy there." -
Toddler - 2 Years
Child begins adding morphemes, forming plurals and limitedly changing verb tenses. "Go bye-bye" may become "going bye-bye" and so on. -
Toddler - 3 Years
Child begins to develop fuller sentence structure. Grammar rules begin to be present in utterances. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) increases from 1.6-2.2 morphemes at 2 years old to just over 3 morphemes at 3 years old. -
Preschool - 4 Years
Child begins to adjust language to fit with conversational partner. Child begins to further learn the rules of language through trial and error, as well as testing and refinement. Child may make incorrect statements and gain further knowledge of correct form when caregivers, adults, and parents restate the child's utterance with correct grammar. "How many is Josh?" would be corrected by an adult in saying "How old is Josh?", teaching the child proper form for asking age. -
School Age - 5 Years
Child has learned approximately 90% of native language form. School exposes child to extraordinary opportunities for language growth. Child becomes exposed to various speech patterns through a multitude of conversation partners and begins to speak in more sophisticated forms. -
School Age - 6 Years
Child begins to learn to read and write and is exposed to various forms of language through simple literature. Child begins to learn to recognize improper forms of language, grammatically incorrect structure, and other errors even if the child is not able to explain or identify why the utterance is incorrect. -
Adolescence - 15 Years
Child is fully proficient in language use, recognizes and can explain errors in grammar and language form, learns multiple meanings for words, understands abstract material in written form, can hypothesize based on written material, recognizes intonation and nuances of language, and has adult-like command of the language. Child uses appropriate gender forms of words, if applicaple.