In this video, we're going to be talking about language milestones. Before we delve into those, we will discuss a few general features of language development common to almost all children, regardless of the language they are learning. Language development occurs extremely rapidly. Syntax skills are acquired fast, and vocabulary expands quickly in the first 5 years of life.
At all stages of language development, comprehension skills tend to develop faster than production skills. This makes sense because comprehension is an internal, cognitive skill, whereas production, or the actual production of speech, requires fine motor coordination of the jaw, the tongue, and the lips. This coordination tends to develop a bit later. Even though we often think of young children as frequently speaking incorrectly, grammatical errors are actually fairly rare.
Often when we do see grammatical errors, it is the result of overapplying rules of grammar, rather than not applying them enough. We will discuss an example of this shortly. Despite children often using shortened sentences or mispronouncing words, their speech is much more grammatical than you might think. We are going to review some productive language milestones here, and although it might seem overwhelming, I encourage you to focus on the progression of these skills rather than on specific ages unless noted as particularly important.
We will begin with newborn babies from 0 to 4 months of age. At this age, we see the emergence of cooing, which consists mainly of vowel sounds such as "ahs," "ooes," and "ehs." These are typically the first productive speech milestones that babies reach. From 4 to 10 months, we observe the emergence of babbling, where babies combine consonants and vowels resulting in classic infant utterances like "ba," "ma," "da," "ga," and so on. It's important to note that at this age, utterances like "mama" or "baba" usually do not yet carry specific meanings associated with, for example, 'mom' or 'bottle.'
Around 10 to 18 months, the emergence of first words typically occurs. These words are usually simple nouns or verbs significant to the child, such as the name of a favorite toy, "mama," "dada," or siblings' names. This span is crucial to note as it's around the age of 1 year that first words typically appear. From 18 to 24 months, children start using telegraphic speech, which are short sentences missing pronouns, articles, or adjectives, such as "throw ball." These messages, though abbreviated, often adhere to basic grammatical rules, with the verb preceding the object.
Between 24 to 36 months, we begin to see the incorporation of elements like articles, pronouns, and adjectives into longer sentences. An example could be "give me the donut," showcasing the addition of a pronoun and an article. From 36 to 60 months, the phenomenon of overregularization appears, where children apply regular grammatical rules to irregular verbs or nouns, leading to phrases like "I runned," "I eat-ed," "the gooses." This gives profound insight into children's understanding of grammar, as they are actively applying rules, sometimes excessively, to words they do not realize are irregular.
By 60 months, or around 5 years of age, children typically obtain adult-like grammar skills. Although they may still mispronounce words or construct shorter sentences than adults, their syntax skills are generally well-established. From this age onward, sentence length and vocabulary will continue to expand rapidly with the child's development.
These are some important language milestones. I will see you guys in our next video. Bye-bye.