Milestones

 

Listed below are communicative milestones broken down by type and age. Information is obtained by LinguiSystems “Guide to Communication Milestones” (2009):

 

Speech Sound Development

According to Sander (1972), 90% of children developmentally acquire the following speech sounds by age:

2 years: /p, b, m, n, h, w, t, k, g, y, -ing/

4 years: /v, s, z, l, j, ch, sh/

5-6 years: /r, th/ /zh/ (like" “television”)

 

Phonological Processes

Phonological processes are patterns of articulation errors children produce when learning to talk. Listed below are the associated ages and phonological processes children remediate:

3 years: final consonant deletion (e.g., “mo”/ “mom”), reduplication (e.g., “baba”/ “bottle”), assimilation (e.g., “bub”/ “bus”), stopping f/s (e.g., “foup”/ “soup”)

3.5 years: fronting (e.g., “tat”/ “cat”), stopping ch/sh (e.g., “chirt”/ “shirt”)

4 years: stopping ch/j (e.g., “choice”/ “juice”), syllable deletion (e.g., “nana”/ “banana”)

4-5 years: cluster reduction (e.g., “top”/ “stop”)

6 years: gliding (e.g., “wabbit”/ “rabbit”)

 

Language Milestones

12 months: Uses 1-5 words, imitates action words and sounds

18 months: Uses 0-50 words, combines 2 words

2 years: Uses 50-300 words, combines 2 to 3 words

3 years: Uses 900-1,000 words, combines 4-5 words

4 years: Uses 2,000 words, makes 5+ word utterances

 

Speech Intelligibility

According to Peña-Brooks & Hegde (2007), speech intelligibility refers to how well an individual is understood by familiar and/or unfamiliar listeners. Listed below are the speech intelligibility expectations by age:

18 months: 25% intelligible

2 years: 50% intelligible

3 years: 75% intelligible

4 years: 90-100% intelligible

 

Morphology

Morphology is the study of how morphemes are put together. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Grammatical morphemes apply inflection that signals meaning to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Listed below are morphological development based upon age:

19-28 months

  • Present progressive “-ing” tense (e.g., “crying”)

29-38 months

  • Regular plural “s” (e.g., “socks”)

  • Present progressive –ing without auxiliary (e.g., “baby crying”)

  • Semiauxiliaries (e.g., “gonna”)

  • Overgeneralization of past tense –ed (e.g., “I runned”)

  • Possessive –s (e.g., “girl’s hat”)

  • Present tense auxiliary ("e.g., “can, do will, be”)

39-42 months

  • Past tense modals (e.g., “could, would, should, must, might”)

  • “Be” verb + present progressive –ing (e.g., “the baby is crying”)

43-46 months

  • Regular past tense –ed (e.g., “he kicked”)

  • Irregular past tense (e.g., “she ate”)

  • Regular third-person-singular, present tense (e.g., “he drinks”)

  • Articles (e.g., “a boy,” “the tree”)

47-50 months

  • Contractible auxiliary (e.g., “the boy’s talking”)

  • Uncontractible copula (e.g., “it is big”)

  • Uncontractible auxiliary (e.g., “he is swimming”)

  • Irregular third person singular (e.g., “she has it”)

  • Past tense “be” verb (e.g., “she was dancing”)