Best Way to Understand the Language Development of a Child

It’s amazing that every child develops language in the same way, progressing through the same stages in the same order. Bear in mind that the follow­ing suggested ages are only approximate, and that wide individ­ual variations are normal between children. At each stage, the child uses language in a new and more-sophisticated format:

• Cooing. Cooing usually begins around the age of eight weeks, and then disappears about twelve weeks later. Although at times a baby’s cooing sounds like words, it has no meaning whatsoever.

• Babbling (random). By the age of five months, an infant’s vocal chords have matured to the point where she can begin to experiment with pitch, vocal range, and breathing, in order to produce a range of sounds. Every child has her own distinctive patterns of noises at this age, and she uses them to communicate with any adult who pays attention to her. Psychologists have found that infants tend to pro­duce the same kinds of babbling sounds, irrespective of their parents’ native language.
• Babbling (controlled). In the next couple of months, an infant gains more control over her sounds. Babbling becomes more conversational. Her sounds become related to the language used by her parents. She may repeat strings of sounds (such as babababababa), and may have a favorite sound that she uses consistently in the same situation.
• Early speech. Toward the end of her first year, a baby begins to use her sounds as though she is engaging in conversation. She may have an earnest expression on her face and make sounds using tones and emphasis found in adult speech.
• First word. By the age of twelve to fifteen months your child will probably have used her first word—she regularly uses a particular sound structure to refer to the same object or per­son. She may generalize this word to include anything that pleases her. Very often this first word is intelligible only to people who know her, but it is her first word all the same.
• Vocabulary growth. From the age of fifteen months onwards, an infant’s vocabulary increases spectacularly. Many two-year-olds are able to use more than two hundred words, although they understand many more.
• Sentences. By eighteen to twenty months, a typical toddler begins to combine two words together to make a short phrase or sentence—for example, “Dada gone” or “More juice.” From this moment on, throughout the remaining childhood years, your child’s ability to use sentences with more words and more-complex meanings continues to develop.

This similarity in terms of stages in the growth of language has enabled psychologists to plot key “milestones” of language development—significant points that most children pass at approximately the same age.