Chapter 11: Child Language Acquisition
This table summarizes some of the typical language development milestones that children reach in the first two years of life. Remember, though, that language learning is not a race! Children vary immensely from each other, and with appropriate access to other humans using language, nearly every child will develop a mental grammar in due time.
| Age | Babies can… |
| Before birth | respond differently to pregnant parent’s voice than other voices (hearing fetuses only). |
| 0;0 | respond differently to prosody of pregnant parent’s spoken language than to other language (hearing infants only). |
| 0;6 | notice differences in handshapes (sighted infants only) and speech segments (hearing infants only). |
| 0;6 | begin to produce rhythmic babbling with syllable structure. |
| 0;9 | produce first words (sign-acquiring babies). |
| 1;0 | categorize phonetically different segments into phoneme categories of the ambient language. |
| 1;0 | understand meanings of about ten common words. |
| 1;0 | produce first words (speech-acquiring babies). |
| 1;2 | interpret novel words differently depending on syntactic category. |
| 1;3 | assign compositional meaning depending on syntactic structure. |
| 1;6 | produce utterances of two or three words. |
| 1;6 | understand meanings of about 50 words. |
| 2;0 | interpret meanings for novel verbs depending on syntactic frames. |
| 2;0 | ask questions. |
