-
First Year of Life
Infants are learning to be communicators. They first become responsive to their caregivers. They start babbling. Infants start to develop signal behavior such as cying to get caregivers attention. This is also the period in which they start to learn the sound patterns of their native language. -
3 to 4 Months Old
Babies start responding vocally. The start responding to ritual and games such diaper changing and playing peekaboo. They form expectations from such rituals and games and participate more including taking turns. -
6 Months Old
The babies have better speech perception due to having better word understanding, word production, and phrase understanding. -
8 to 9 Months Old
Babies start developing intentionality through gesturing and actions to attract attention. Their communicative actions are intending for a purpose. -
12 Months Old
Babies start producing their first words. -
18 Months Old
Babies hold and produce from a vocabulary of approximately 50 words. They are starting to combine words based on word order. The start producing basic structures such as articles, adjectives, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, pronouns and adverbs. -
2 Years Old
The toddlers vocabulary growth is slow for the first few month and then later increases rapidly. By this age they have an approximate vocabulary of 150 to 300 words. They start producing 2 to 4 word sentences along with using bound morphemes. They start to develop the ability to produce adultlike negative, interrogative, and imperative sentence. They start produing complex questions such as "Is she mad?" and "Why is she mad?" -
3 Years Old
These toddlers have a vocabulary of approximately of 900 to 1,500 words. The start to produce adult like sentence structure. They use substition such as "The ball is red." and "The shoe is red.". Most of the utterances they produce contain both a subject and a verb. -
4 Years Old
The preschool aged children have the ability to change their style of talking to fit the person they are conversing with. They able to form compund sentences. They are also able to tell simple sequential stories. -
5 Years Old
By this age, 90% of language forms are learned. Most communcications are now outside of the home. Now that reading and writing are incorporated, they are able to think about their language in abstract and understand correctiveness. -
6 Years Old
By this age, children have vocabulary of approximately 2,600 words. -
Teens
By this time, language development slows and stabilizes.They have an approximate vocabulary of approximately 60,000 words by the time they are in high school. Teenagers are able to participate competently in conversations and telling of narratives. They knows multiple meanings of words and figurative language.
