Milestones
There are three well-accepted milestones in the development of speech and language.
- When the child says his or her first words (normally around one). This may be the first name of a parent, Mummy or Daddy, a familiar item of food or clothing, something interesting ike a bus, a tractor, or an animal, or a greeting, hello or goodbye or bye bye, and more. It may be a long way off-target in terms of sound structure, but you know, or you think you know, what it’s supposed to be;
- When he or she first combines two words or parts of words in one utterance. There are different ways of defining what counts as a ‘word’ – both generally and in the context here. By the proposal here, there are significant steps in the process of putting words together, with “Bye, Daddy” by one step, and “See Daddy” by a later step. These steps are normally reached in the second half of the second year – by the age of two;
- When he or she can be understood most of the time by adults who don’t know him or her (normally around three and a half). Sometimes this is said to be ‘talking perfectly’. But it is exceedingly rare for children to reach adult levels of speech and language as early as this. Most children go on learning to talk until they are around ten.
Very rarely, a child of five can take part in discussion about matters of adult interest.
See https://speechandlanguage.org.uk/talking-point/parents/ages-and-stages/ for an ‘Ages and Stages’ listing of roughly what might be expected when from six months to seventeen years, from a perspective rather different from the framework and the biolinguistics assumed here. For better or worse, the framework here focuses on syntax, as opposed to discourse, as seemingly assumed by the Ages and Stages framework. In one sense, the latter is more detailed. In another sense, the stages are defined less precisely than by the three milestones above, spelt out in more detail by the proposal here.
Only the most approximate of schedules
First, during the second half of the first year, the child babbles, rehearsing the forms of speech and language with no detectable meanings or intentions. Then the child starts producing what Martin Braine (1962) called ‘holophrases’ – expressions which sound like they might contain more than one word – but not occurring on their own – like OZAH, as an expression of apparent curiosity, possibly modeled on “What’s that?”. Then gradually the elements become more distinct, as in “Mummy bye” or “Daddy bye”, with no clear structural relation between the elements, Then, typically sometime between 18 and 21 months, elements more recognisable as words start to be put together. The child says something like “MM BAH” as he or she is being put into the bath, with two contrasting elements relating to a significant entity in the child’s universe, in this case bath, and a plausible version of the preposition in, in a primitive prototype of a phrase. Then between a week and three months after saying something like “In bath” most naturally interpreted as a simple ‘declarative’, as such structures are known, the child either asks a question like “Where Daddy?” or answers a fully formed corresponding question by an adult like “Where’s Daddy?” by an appropriate and plausible reference to place, possibly by a single word. But not in the opposite order. In other words, two word declaratives precede one word answers to questions, even though the one word answer might seem simpler. This is the lowermost point which can be characterised in terms of the sort of relation, outlined by the Framework here. From this point, acquisition can be plotted by a seven-step path towards the essentials of the end-state. But there is no schedule, other than a very approximate one. Each child has his or her own ideas about this.