CHILDREN CANNOT LEARN TO READ & WRITE IF THE LANGUAGE ISN’T ADEQUATELY LEARNED
Birth to 6 months
Your baby is here and now you are just trying to get some sleep! Your child is feeding around the clock and it seems like your child just eats and sleeps. However, even at this early stage in life, your child should be exhibiting some important language skills. Here are some things your child should be doing by the first six months of life:
• Loud noises should startle him
• Your child should respond by smiling when tickled or touched
• Responds to voice and sound
• Familiar voices or sounds should quiet your child
• Attends to speaking voices
• Social smile (when being talked to or pampered)
• Responds to angry vocal tones by crying
• Your child should briefly hold and inspect two objects
• Responds to pleasant tones by cooing
• Localizes sounds by turning toward noises or voices and looking in the general direction
• Responds to pleasant speech by smiling and laughing
• Your child should use different kinds of crying for pain, hunger, and discomfort
• Babbles and coos in vocal play
• Babbles to self, others and objects
• Your child may begin to laugh out loud
• Your should start babbling to get your attention and express demands.
A child with a learning disability will have problems in some but not all academic skill areas. The learning disability may be reflected in the child’s oral expression, listening comprehension, mathematics calculation, or mathematics reasoning. A child cannot learn to read and write fluently if the native language has not been learned adequately. There are few academic subjects a child can learn without reading (or understanding what is said in the classroom) and few tests that can be passed without writing (or expressing knowledge by using language). Speech-language pathologists, in cooperation with other specialists in the school system, deal with students for whom language and communication are the major problems. Listed on the left are are age groups, please click on them and a box will pop up with information pertaining to the age group.
6 to12 months:
By this time, your child should be sleeping through most of the night. Your days are turning back to normal. This is the next stage where concrete responses emerge and your child is starting to respond to words consistently.
• Responds to own name with head turn, eye contact, or smile
• Understands no
• Responds to specific person
• Responds to bye bye
• Your child should be able to shake his head yes and no to some questions
• She should be able to follow simple instructions (11 or 12 months)
• Singing tones
• Tries to repeat sounds produced by others
• Uses intonation patterns with jargon speech
• He should be directing sounds and gestures to objects and persons
• Echolalia begins (repeating what is said); At 9 to 12 months your child will start imitating sound sequences or patterns
• First word appears
• There should be a five to six word vocabulary by 12 months; intentional language begins
1 – 2 years:
Your child is walking. You should now “baby proof” the entire house. But, you should also look for critical advancement with your child’s vocabulary and fundamental language skills. Your child will amaze you are how much information he learns and how quickly he learns it.
• Understands simple commands and prohibitions
• Your child will recognize familiar objects, persons, and pets
• Your child will start identifying one body part
• Your child will also start following directions involving spatial concepts “in” and “on”
• Responds to “wh” questions
• By 20 months, you child should be identifying at least 3 to 4 body parts
• Your child will be able to perceive others’ emotions
• Understands the difference between pronouns like, “Give it to ME” and “Give it to HER”
• By 22 months your child will be identifying 5 body parts consistently
• Comprehends 300 words, approximately
• Your child use his first phrase, first sentence, first pronoun and first adjectives and adverbs.
• Simple verbs emerge such as see, want, and go
2 1/2 - 3 years:
Your child’s sentences are now longer and filled with plurals, possessives, prepositions, pronouns. Your child is also describing actions from stories and using his imagination more.............the introduction of the “imaginary friend”.
• By now, you should see a rapid increase in comprehension vocabulary: 400 words by 30 months
• 800 words by 36 months (wow!!)
• Your child is responding to commands using on, under, up, down, over here, and jump
• Your child responds to commands using two related actions such as “run fast” or “jump high”.
• Interactive pragmatics becomes more concrete and your child understands turn-taking with others.
• She is now following two-step commands
• Your child is able to identify seven body parts
• Your child is also interested in explanations of why and how
• Recognizes and understands most common objects
• Dysfluencies are common (that’s when your child tends to repeat sounds or words when speaking, most people recognizes the action as stuttering)
• By the end of this stage your child should be up to 900 words of vocabulary
• He will be using short simple sentences
• Your child should be 90% intelligible with consistent, understandable speech.
• Your child should understand most common adjectives
• She starts to carry on a purposeful conversation
• You child starts to talk when playing alone. (don’t worry its normal)
• Your child can talk about immediate experiences (this is where you see a lot of tattle-telling)
• Identifies objects by name and use
• Uses personal pronouns (first and second person) correctly
• Your child will verbalize toilet needs
• She will ask for “another”
• She will now nursery rhymes
• He will name three objects in a picture
2 – 2 1/2 years:
Here’s where the true conversation starts. Your child should be having small conversations with you at this point......and you won’t be able to stop her from talking!!
• Your child is now demonstrating that he understands several action words by selecting appropriate pictures.
• Your child is recognizing and identifying family name categories such as baby, grandma, mother, father
• Jargon should be at a minimal at this point (Jargon – sounds, syllables, vowels and vocal productions that are not meaningful “words” or sound productions....jibber-jabber)
• Her vocabulary should be 200-300 words.
• Distinguishes prepositions in and under
• Distinguishes prepositions on and many
• Listens to simple stories
• Understands come-go, run-stop, give-take
• Understands semantic difference of subject-object by position of noun. (for example, “show us the car pushing the truck, the truck pushing the car”)
• Your child will understand all sentence structures
• Your child understands simple questions
• Your child should be able to say his full name
• Your child should be able to repeat 2 digits (numbers) from memory
3 - 4 years:
Ok. These are the years that you child’s auditory comprehension increases significantly. Your child begins to understand more of what he hears verbally. It is very important at this stage to model correct speech and language use to make sure your child does not incorrect grammar, poor or ambiguous meaning, poor pronunciation, or slang.
• Improving in listening skills and beginning to learn from listening
• Understanding up to 1500 words by the age of 4
• She recognized plurals, sex differences, pronouns, and adjectives
• Your child’s Mean sentence length is approximately 4.3
• Your child’s speech should be 90% to 100% intelligible in context; there may still be slight difficulty with sentence structure
• Your child is now carrying on long conversations
• Your child is now bossing and criticizing others.
• Your child is could still have problems producing fricatives, sibilants, /r/, and /l/
• He is using more compound and complex sentences which are more grammatically correct
• More consistent and correct use of plurals and possessives
• More consistent use of imperative and emphatic sentences
• She should be asking “why” more often at this point.
• Uses what, where, and how more often
• Should be using the pronoun “we”
• Analogies of opposites are evident: brother is a boy, sister is a ____
4 - 5 years:
You now have a little “man” or a little “woman” as we tend to affectionately refer to our children. Your child should understand and use almost all parts of early childhood language learning skills. Your child’s conversational skills are advanced (for early childhood language skills) and she is now telling you everything you wanted to know about her school day.
• Your child comprehends 1500 – 2000 words
• She carries out more complex commands, with two – three word actions
• He understands dependent clauses if, because, when, and why
• Your child’s vocabulary is 2000 words
• Your child’s mean length utterance is 4.3 words
• Articulation sounds are 80% correct
• Your child can define words in terms of use
• Language skills are fairly complete in structure and form
• She is able to use conjunctions and understands prepositions
• He is using longer, more complex sentences
• Will reply to simple questions like “what is a house made of?”
• Your child should be able to tell a story about himself or the environment around him.
• There are still grammatical errors during speech, but less frequently.
5 - 6 years:
With this stage of early language development, you will see more advanced sentence structure, and an increase of the syntactical usage of the English language.
• Understands vocabulary of 2500-2800 words
• Responds correctly to more complicated sentences, although there is confusion at times with involved sentences.
• Expressive vocabulary is at approximately 2500 words
• Mean sentence length is five to six words or longer
• Articulation should be completely intelligible
• Your child should be using almost all phrase structure and transformation rules of adult English. There will be times when incorrect forms may occur periodically.
• Comparative adjectives are used such as, big-bigger, small-smallest, etc
• He will be able to answer the phone and carry a conversation.
• She will be able to exchange information, ask questions, and relate stories
• She will also be able to use the correct irregular verb in sentences such as: be, go, do, get, can, have, will, etc.
• Articles an, a and the are now used correctly
• Prepositions to, of, in, up, on, etc are now used properly
• Your child should be able to tell a familiar story.
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