Speech And Language Development Norms

0-3 months | Recognition of the smell of her mother. Baby stops crying when she hears her mother's voice. Recognition of familiar voices. | Crying when hungry. Cooing from 5-6 weeks. Crying when distressed. | Swallowing reflex. Sucking reflex. Rooting reflex. | Smiles of contentment from 5-6 weeks. Close contact with parent/carer. Contentment with familiar persons. | Not applicable |

* Have different cries for different needs. For example one cry for hunger, another when they are tired.

In the initial few months babies will recognise familiar voices and faces, they will try to 'people please' and bay for attention by performing for their audience through laughter and giggles. They will enjoy playing games with others such as peek a boo.

3-7 year olds are developing their speech and become much more social. They ask lots of questions helping their development even more, talking in past, present and future tenses. Most children will be in a school or nursery and developing their skills in numeracy and literacy. They will be learning to read and will call on adults to help and for approval and praise.

Nature and nurture both play a significant role in language development. Language development refers to how children understand, organise, speak and use words in order to communicate at an effective, age-appropriate level (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). For centuries, theorists have been debating the roles of nature versus nurture. Although, each child’s language will develop at their own pace and there will be many individual differences based on culture, ethnicity, health and ability. As well as physical, social, emotional and cognitive development in which will contribute to a child’s language development.

| Between the ages 2-3 the child will be able to put words into sentences, ask questions like what? and why? etc., for a well-known song they will begin to sing along with it and are also able to use over hundreds and hundreds or words by age 3.

Babies from the age of 0-5 months react to loud sounds and turn their heads towards where the sound is coming from for example a toy or voice. Babies this age watch your face when you speak and make noises when they here pleasurable or displeasurable sounds such and laughing ,crying and

|Months |mobile (rolling, squirming or crawling). When |disappears they still exist, so baby will look |such as dinner or bath. Babbling sounds more |play “peek-a-boo”. Prefer and will actively try |

Enjoys playing with other people and might get upset when the person stops intereacting with them

Between 6-9 months the baby’s brain will start to develop faster and faster at any other time during their life. Their memory will become quite strong they will repeat things over and over again. They will also learn what they are hearing which could be songs or rhymes or whilst they are being spoken to by parents siblings or strangers.

Babies prefer the sound of humans interacting to other sounds and from this, they quickly learn to recognise and identify their mother’s voice. Babies form their first relationship through emotional attachments with their mother or main carer. The first year of a baby’s life is a period of incredible growth, and a baby’s brain goes through critical periods during which stimulation is needed for proper development. During the babies first years, visual stimuli or verbal language is necessary for areas of the brain to grow and without this growth, a child’s vision or speaking abilities might be impaired. Infants tend to have different cries for hunger or pain, as well as making other noises. These abilities show your child is gaining communication and pre-language skills. Infants from birth to 6 months will forget about objects they cannot see however they begin to explore objects they can see and grab by putting them in their mouths. They will also follow moving objects with their eyes and look around at nearby objects. Infants in this stage will turn to look at a source of sound. These developmental milestones show a baby’s brain is developing and they are gaining new skills. From 7 to 12 months, infants also learn the idea of cause and effect, and they might repeat an action that causes a

The first two years of a child’s life is filled with adventure and learning. Throughout this time period they will learn to sit up, crawl, walk, talk, amongst many more things. Their psychological development and interactions with their social environment change along with their forms of communication as they mature and learn; all of which can be seen and explained in Erikson’s stages of development and child-directed speech.

The second stage following the babbling stage is the one word stage. The average age of a child is approximately 9-18 months where the pattern is “single words: 50 or so common words in the environment (Denham- Lobeck, 40)”. Usually the words produced by the subject are verbs and nouns. Some of those verbs and nouns could be pronounced the same way the adult pronounces it, although other words will sound distorted as shown in (1) and (2) below. Another pattern infants tend to follow in this stage is that of overextension, where they stretch out the meaning of words, and underextension, where the infants will have a less significant understanding of a word compared to an adult. This is shown in (3) and

months. In this stage the child understands more language than he can produce, for example when a mother

Once the child has began its basics of language acquisition it then requires a sufficient and constant input from other more advanced language users (Adults) in order to grasp and work out the regularities of that language. There are also Pre—language stages. These pre-linguistic sounds which are made in the early stages in the Childs language acquisition are simply called ‘cooing’ and ‘babbling’. By roughly 4 to 6 months of age babies start to make many more