Parent Resources
Speech Milestones
Understanding Speech Sound Development in Children
Is your child's speech development on track? This chart, based on research by Crowe and McLeod (2020), shows the ages by over 90% of children have mastered various speech sounds. For example, by age three, most children can correctly pronounce sounds like /t/, /k/, /g/, /ŋ/, /f/, and /j/. This guide helps you compare your child's speech development with typical age-related milestones. If you notice significant differences, it might be a good idea to consult a speech-language pathologist for personalized advice.
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Speech Sound Development Chart: U-S Based Norms
Language Milestones
0 - 3 Months
Listening and Understanding: Reacts to familiar voices and sounds, starts to quiet or smile when spoken to, showing early signs of auditory processing abilities that are foundational for later language development.
Speaking: Primary communication is through crying; begins to coo and make pleasure sounds, which are early forms of vocal experimentation.
4 - 6 Months
Listening and Understanding: Notices toys that make sounds; turns head towards direction of sounds.
Speaking: Babbling begins, including both long and short groups of sounds (e.g., "bababa"), laughs, and vocal play.
Listening and Understanding: Notices toys that make sounds; turns head towards direction of sounds, indicating developing auditory discrimination.
Speaking: Babbling begins, with a mix of sounds; this vocal play is crucial for the development of phonetic elements of language.
7 - 12 months
Listening and Understanding: Responds to own name, responds to simple verbal requests.
Speaking: Uses a mix of babbling and simple words like "mama" and "dada," begins to use speech or non-crying sounds to get and keep attention.
13 - 18 months
Listening and Understanding: Follows simple commands, understands simple questions (e.g., "Where's your shoe?").
Speaking: Says 8-10 words (typical age for first word is around 12 months), starts to combine sounds and gestures, imitates simple words and actions.
19 - 24 months
Listening and Understanding: Identifies objects by name, starts to listen to simple stories and songs.
Speaking: Rapid vocabulary growth, starts using words more frequently, begins two-word phrases (semantic relations), such as “more milk” or “no bed,” indicating early sentence structure.
2 - 3 years
Listening and Understanding: Understands "wh-" questions (who, what, where, why), can follow two-step instructions.
Speaking: Vocabulary grows to about 200-1,000 words; uses three-word sentences; Brown’s first morphemes emerge, including plural -s, past tense -ed, and possessive 's.
3 - 4 years
Listening and Understanding: Understands basic color names and simple shapes, enjoys stories and asks questions about them.
Speaking: Four-to-five-word sentences; clearer speech; more complex sentence structures begin to emerge; can usually use sentences that include more than one action or idea.
4 -5 years
Listening and Understanding: Understands time concepts like "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow."
Speaking: Vocabulary of over 1,500 words; tells simple stories using full sentences; uses future tense; sentences can be eight or more words in length.
5 Years and Older
Listening and Understanding: Follows a series of three directions, understands ordinal concepts such as "first," "second."
Speaking: Complex sentence structures are more consistently used; explains how to do things; understands and uses question words; speech is largely grammatically correct.