Speech and language milestones

Posted on February 24, 2019 by - Speech Therapy

During the transition from infancy into the preschool years, children experience an intensive period of speech and language development. They learn about the world around them through play and their little brains work hard to understand the nuances of communication. This is an exciting time for your child, and also for you as a parent. But have you found yourself in a situation where you have difficulty understanding what your child is saying? Or perhaps you’re getting a short response to ‘What did you do today?’ To understand why this might be happening, let’s first break communication into two parts – speech and language.

Speech

Speech refers to how we produce sounds in words. Some sounds are easier to produce than others, for example ‘m’ and ‘p’ are earlier developing sounds. This is why a child’s first words is often ‘mama’ or ‘papa’. Speech sound development is a gradual process. As children grow older, they acquire more complex speech sounds. The illustration below reflects the most recent research on children’s speech acquisition.

As children learn new sounds, their speech intelligibility also increases. Speech intelligibility refers to the clarity of speech or the portion of verbal output that is understood by an unfamiliar listener. By the age of four, children have acquired almost all speech sounds and should be completely intelligible.

Language

Language refers to how we understand and use words to communicate.

We can further break language into two components.

  • Receptive language – understanding what others say
  • Expressive language – ability to use words and sentences to express thoughts

Research shows toddlers build their receptive language skills before they begin to use words.

Similar to speech sound acquisition, language development is also a gradual process. Below are the language milestones we expect children to achieve from infancy through to school age.

12 months:

  • Points and uses early gesture to request
  • Understands 50 words (e.g. no, up)
  • Produce a few single words (e.g. mum, dad)

 

 

 18 months:

  • Understands up to 50 words and one-step instructions (e.g. get your shoes)
  • Produces 6-20 single words

 

 

 

24 months:

  • Follows two-part instructions (e.g. give me the ball and teddy).
  • Produces 50 words, including a range of nouns (e.g. car), adjectives (e.g. big) and socially appropriate phrases (e.g., how are you?)

 
3 years:

  • Understands 200 words and follows more complex instructions (e.g. put the cup on the table and come here).
  • Expressive: stringing 4-5 words together to produce sentences
  • Beginning to understand and respond to early WH- questions; Who? What? Where?

 

 4 years:

  • Understand and respond to more complex WH- questions.
  • Using conjunctions (e.g. ‘and’, ‘but’) to increase their sentence length
  • Building category specific vocabulary, e.g. colours, numbers

 

 

 5 years:

  • Follows three-part instructions (e.g. pack your bag, put on your shoes and sit in the car).
  • Understands temporal concepts, e.g. ‘before eating, turn the TV off’
  • Producing longer sentences, to recount past events and tell stories
  • Using correct verb tenses (e.g. I walked, I will walk)

 

Now, that is a lot to take in.

And a lot that we expect our little ones to ‘just know’.

Coming back to our initial situation, perhaps the reason you have difficulty understanding your child is due to a speech sound delay? Or maybe they don’t have language skills required to firstly understand your question and then respond. Speech Pathologists can support children by forming individualised plans to achieve age appropriate communication milestones.

If you are concerned about your child’s speech and/or language development, contact our Speech Pathology service for an initial consultation. There is strong evidence advising against the ‘wait and see’ approach. The research supporting the long-term benefits of early speech pathology intervention is overwhelming.

 

Japjot Kaur

Speech Pathologist

B.App.Sc (Speech Pathology), MSPA, CPSP

Sydney West Speech Therapy

 

We welcome, Japjot Kaur our Speech Pathologist to our team. She is an experienced clinician with special interest in early speech and language intervention. Japjot also provides adult Speech Pathology inpatient services at Westmead Private Hospital and outpatient services at the Westmead rooms.