The Stages of Language Development in a Child

Birth to 6 Months

• The earliest stages of language development may not appear to involve language at all. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a child is learning language in his first few days as he begins to understand that crying gets his parents' attention and gets his needs met. The child also begins to recognize the sound of his parents' voices and other meaningful sounds in his environment. By the end of this stage, a child's ability to produce sounds that mimic language in their intonation has developed. He should also be able to identify his own name.

Six Months to 12 Months

• The Child Development Institute reports that this is about the time when a child will gain the ability to say her first word or two. She may not understand what she is saying at first, but comprehension will develop as she begins to make sense of others' reactions to what she has said. In the area of receptive language, a baby at this stage can understand speech as a social tool and also follow simple, one-step commands when they are accompanied by other cues.

Twelve Months to 24 Months

• Between one and two years of age, there is a real surge in the observable areas of language development. During this time, a child's spoken vocabulary will leap from one word to somewhere between 150 and 300 words---which he may even begin to combine into short sentences. He will be saying more words, but the adults around him may not always understand. Towards the end of this stage, the Child Development Institute indicates that his speech should be comprehensible most of the time. While the child will still struggle with the rhythm and fluency of speech, he will begin to master two special features of language: prepositions and pronouns.

Beyond 24 Months

• By the time a child reaches her third birthday, her vocabulary will include about 1,000 words, and she should be speaking clearly enough for comprehension almost all of the time. A 4-year-old child can be expected to name some common animals and at least one color. Look for her to also narrate her actions as she goes through her day. Once she turns 5, she will be able to use adjectives and adverbs and have a sense of the more basic concepts of time. She will be using longer, more complex sentences now, and doing so with a fairly good grasp of grammar. By the time she reaches the age of 8, her skills will have been refined to allow her to converse with an adult with relative ease.