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, this points to a focus 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.

At least by my own research, the approach assumed and defended here leads to faster and more complete therapeutic results than any alternative that I know of.