Language development in young children

As soon as children are born, they begin to learn the tools with which to understand and communicate with the world around them. Psychologists have mapped out a series of steps taken by young children as they begin to master oral communication.

 

1. 3 months – 1 year: Babbling – children make meaningless sounds and imitate the sounds, tones, and pitches made by the adults around them. While children in all cultures babble, eventually the sounds uttered will resemble the sounds found in the child’s environment
2. Around 1 year: Children can express short words (usually beginning with consonants) – ball, dada. Children at this stage have a good deal of comprehension
3. 1-3 years: Begin to speak in 2-3 word combinations. By age 2, a child’s vocabulary is around 50 words. Rapid vocabulary increase begins around 18 months. Children start to produce telegraphic sentences (sentences without articles – e.g. “Go potty,” “I pet cat”).
4. 3 years: Children begin to pluralize words and use past tense. Children often overgerneralize – for example, they add the suffix “-ed” to all past tense verbs (“I falled down,” “Mommy goed to work”).
5. 5 years: By this age, children have acquired the basic rules of languge but their vocabulary and grammatical skills continue to grow.

First Words - from http://www.getmiked.com