How much do you know about infant language development?

Language Acquisition in Infants: The Developmental Timeline

• Children develop language at roughly the same time and schedule as motor skills and brain maturation.
• Infants actively process speech sounds before they begin to talk, evidenced by their attention and sucking behavior.
• By one month, infants can distinguish between [ba] and [pa], and by five months, they can discriminate between syllables like [ba] and [ɡa].
• Cooing, the earliest speech-like sound, occurs during the first few months of life, with the production of vowel-like sounds and velar consonants like [k] and [ɡ].
• Babbling occurs between six and eight months, characterized by different vowels and consonants and combinations like ba-ba-ba and ga-ga-ga.
• Late babbling occurs around nine to ten months, with recognizable intonation patterns and syllable sequences like ma-ma-ma and da-da-da.
• Late babbling also marks the child's ability to use vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis as they stand and attempt imitations.
• Child language researchers report on the age of children's language development, but there is substantial variation among children.
• The one-word stage occurs between twelve and eighteen months, where children produce recognizable single-unit utterances for objects like "milk", "cookie", and "cat".
• Holophrastic speech, where a single form functions as a phrase or sentence, is used to describe these utterances, which may also be extended beyond object naming.
• During this stage, children may refer separately to people and objects but are not yet ready to put the forms together in a more complex phrase.
• Developmental stages should be treated as general approximations subject to variation in individual children.