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Lifespan of Language Development
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At 3 months old, a baby is able to respond vocally and with facial expression to another person (Owens, p 106, Table 5.1 & para 2).
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At 8 months old, a baby will begin to gesture to communicate their needs; they have developed "intentionality in their interactions primarily through gestures" (Owens, et al... 2011, p 107, para 2).
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The one year old baby begins to speak, using words instead of gestures to communicate their needs.
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The 18 month old toddler now has a vocabulary of approximately 60 words and can combine words togetherusing word order rules (Owens, et al... 2011, p 108, para 2).
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The two year old toddler has a vocabulary of 150 to 300 words and can make new word-referent associations with as few as three exposures (Owens, 2011, p 109, para 1).
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Three year old toddlers now use a “more adult-like sentence structure… most children’s utterances contain both a subject and a verb” (Owens, et al… 2011, p 106, Table 5.1 & p 112, para 5).
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The four year old can now change the style of their speech to fit the listener are joining two or more independent clauses together to form compound sentences” (Owens, et al…2011, p 106, Table 5.1, & p 112, para 8).
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At age five, the child has learned 90% of their language and average “five year olds use very adult like language form, although many of the more subtle syntactic structures are missing” (Owens, et al…2011, p 106, Table 5.1 & p 114, para 1).
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The six year old is beginning to “learn visual mode of communication with writing and reading” (Owens, et al.. 2011, p 106, Table 5.1).
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Teenagers become more effective conversationalists able to discuss topics with skills such as taking turns, interrupting, asking relevant questions to the conversation, understanding multiple word meanings and figurative language, genderlect, and telling narratives using details in sequential order (Owens, et al…2011, p 106, Table 5.1 and p 114, para 2-3).
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Adult language development continues to change and grow as the adult’s life changes with work, education, interests, and life experiences as long as the physical health does not cause any impairments (Owens, et al… 2011, p 115, para 115).