Speech & Language Milestones

While all children grow and change at their own rate, some children may experience delays in their development. The following are a few guidelines of typical developmental speech and language milestones for young children.

For more specific information regarding speech and language development, please contact us.

Birth to 6 months

  • Uses different cry to express different needs
  • Jumps and jerks to loud noises
  • Turns head toward direction of someone talking
  • Exhibits social smile
  • Localizes to sounds
  • Listens to speech
  • Uses early phonemes /b/ /p/ and /m/ when babbling
  • Uses sounds or gestures to indicate wants
  • Responds to “no” and changes in tone of voice

7 months to 12 months

  • Understands “no” and “hot”
  • Responds to simple requests
  • Understands and responds to his/her own name
  • Recognizes words for common items (nouns)
  • Uses a large variety of sounds and intonation patterns
  • Uses speech sounds rather than only crying to get attention
  • Listens when spoken to
  • Uses sound and word approximations
  • Develops standardized gestures
    • Showing
    • Giving
    • Pointing
    • Requesting
  • Babbling begins to change to jargon
  • Follows simple requests (“clap your hands” “bye bye”)
  • Has an expressive vocabulary of 1-3 words
  • Verbalize or vocalize in response to verbal requests

13 to 18 months

  • Imitates individual words
  • Uses adult-like intonation patterns
  • Uses echolalia and jargon
  • Omits some initial consonants and almost all final consonants
  • Follows simple commands
  • Understands 50 words
  • Says 3-20 words (mostly nouns)
  • Combines gestures and vocalizations
  • Asks for “more” and “what’s that?”

19 to 24 months

  • Uses words more frequently than jargon
  • Understands 300 or more words
  • Has an expressive vocabulary of 50-150 words
  • Begins using 2 word phrases (noun+verb and adjective+noun)
  • Speech is 50% intelligible to unfamiliar listener
  • Enjoys listening to age appropriate stories
  • Understands basic categories (toys, food, animals)
  • Points to objects or pictures when named

2 to 3 years

  • Speech is 50-75% intelligible to an unfamiliar listener
  • Has an expressive vocabulary of 100-250 words
  • Uses 2-4 word phrases
  • Consistently uses simple pronouns (I, you, me, mine)
  • Uses negation
  • Understands locations phrases
  • States gender and first and last name
  • Uses prepositions (in, on, off, out, up, down, under, etc.)

3 to 4 years

  • Speech is 80% intelligible to unfamiliar listener
  • Has an expressive vocabulary of 800-1500 words
  • Uses 3-5 word sentences
  • Relates recent experiences through verbalization
  • Responds to “wh” questions
  • Converses in sentences
  • Developmental disfluency appears (repetitions of 1st syllables and I)

4 to 5 years

  • Speech is 100% intelligible to an unfamiliar listener
  • Has an expressive vocabulary of 900-2000 words
  • Uses 4-8 word sentences
  • Uses regular and some irregular past tense verbs
  • Understands words that describe sequence (first, next last)
  • Says all speech sounds in words. May make mistakes on sounds that are harder to say, like l, s, r, v, z, ch, sh, th
  • Follows longer directions ("Put your pajamas on, brush your teeth, and then pick out a book)

5 to 7 years

  • Narratives are true “stories” central focus, high-point and resolution
  • Average expressive vocabulary size is 3000-5000 words
  • Ability to segment words into phonemes emerges
  • Use and understand passive sentences (i.e. “the boy was bitten by the dog”)

7 to 9 years

  • Increased perspective taking allows for more successful persuasion
  • Some words understood to have multiple meanings (i.e. bark and bark)
  • A few errors in noun phrases persist (i.e. “much bricks”)
  • Articulation is mostly error-free
  • Some difficulty with complex words may persist (“aluminum” “cinnamon”)

9 to 12 years

  • Understand jokes and riddles based on lexical ambiguity
  • Vocabulary used in school texts is more complex than that used in conversation
  • Morphophonological knowledge develops and is used in spelling
    • Prefixes (i.e. pre-   “pretest” “prenuptial”)
    • Derivational (i.e. –less “worthless” “hopeless”)
    • Inflectional (i.e. –ed (past) “walked”     -s (plural) “walks”)