Stages of Typical Language Development
| vocalizes, responds to name, responds to angry or happy tone of voice | 6 months |
| uses one or more words spontaneously to express meaning, can understand simple instructions, practices voice inflections | 12 months |
| has vocabulary of more than five meaningful words, repeats a word or phrase over and over (echolalia), jargons (babbles), can follow simple commands | 18 months |
| can name several common objects, uses two prepositions (e.g. in, on ), uses two pronouns correctly, combines nouns and verbs, has a 150+ word vocabulary, voice volume, pitch, and fluency are poor, points to body parts on command | 24 months |
| uses I, you, me correctly; uses some plurals and past tenses, uses three prepositions, uses 3 word sentences, vocabulary is around 1000 words, speech is intelligible, child can understands most simple questions, can describe an event or action reasonably well, knows what sleepy, hungry, cool, and thirsty mean, can tell gender, name, and age, engages in doll play pretending that doll is self | 36 months |
| knows names of familiar animals, uses at least four prepositions, names common objects in picture books or magazines, knows one or more colors, can remember a sequence of 4 digits or syllables, can play with dolls making two dolls talk to each other, talks to self continually, understands superlatives like longer, larger, repeats words and phrases (echoes) frequently | 48 months |
| uses adjectives and adverbs, knows common opposites, understands one-to-one correspondence up to five objects, can recite numbers to ten, can repeat a sentence with nine words, can tell what common objects are used for , can follow a three step command, understands time concepts: morning, afternoon, night, day, later, after, while, tomorrow, yesterday, today, speech is generally grammatically correct | 60 months |
| f, v, sh, zh, th are articulated correctly, understands more/less and number concepts up to 10, can tell a story about a picture using past and imperfect verb tenses, sequence of events and relationships | 6 years |
| s-z, r, ch, wh, are articulated correctly, can understand analogies, can tell time at quarter, half hour and hour, can read and print some words | 7 years |
| can describe and explain complex events coherently, no articulation errors should persist, reading is fairly easy, child can write simple paragraphs, and can converse with adults | 8 years |