Child’s Speech Developmental Milestones
First of all, I’d love to provide you with an answer to the age old question…
“What is the difference between speech and language?”
The easiest explanation is this: Language is what someone says, and Speech is the way it sounds.
What you’ll learn in this guide:
Intelligibility Milestones (what percentage of your child’s speech do you understand)
Speech Sound Milestones (which sounds should you expect to hear first and which ones will come later on)
Intelligibility Milestones
Intelligibility: a perceptual judgement of how much of a child’s spontaneous speech a listener understands.
Typically, as a child grows the amount of their speech that is understandable increases. There is an obvious difference in this percentage judgement for a familiar listener such as a parent, sibling or caregiver, and that of an unfamiliar listener like a new friend, or distant relative. In both of these judgements, it’s important to give the child the benefit of context. So it’s not a measure of how much of that child’s speech you understand with your eyes closed, but also taking into account their actions. So if they’re playing with a truck on a track and say, “mama tuk! tuk mama!” we can easily interpret that child’s words as “tuk” = truck. If a listener had no visual information and was solely relying on what they hear, “tuk” may not easily translate to truck.
I want to stress that intelligible doesn’t mean perfect. If you little one is saying “paghetti” for spaghetti, or “cool” for school, they are likely exhibiting “errors” that are developmentally appropriate. When we talk about intelligibility, we mean plainly, can you interpret what they are trying to say and understand their communication.
Here’s a super handy chart to measure if your child is on track for meeting their intelligibility milestones:
BIRTH - 3 MONTHS
18 months - 25% Intelligible
24 months - 50-75% Intelligible
36 months - 75-100% Intelligible
Speech Sound Milestones
Okay, let’s talk Speech Sounds! Just like intelligibility ratings, speech sound acquisition can also vary from kid to kid. The following milestones are a guide for helping you do two things:
Determine whether your child would benefit from a speech evaluation by a speech-language pathologist (psst… you can schedule a free consult to talk that over with me, here).
Set accurate expectations for the sounds you are concerned your child is not yet saying (like the “s” did you know we don’t expect children to have the “s” sound perfected until age 6! Crazy, huh?)
When we talk about speech sounds there are sounds that are expected to come before others. The ages mentioned in the handy chart below are the age at which we expect a child to have mastered a sound… in all of it’s positions.
What’s a position you ask? Good question. A position refers to where in the word the sound occurs. The initial position refers to the beginning of the word, the medial is in the middle, and the final is, well, at the end! Take the K sound for instance:
Initial position - King, Cat, Cookie, Color
Medial (middle) position - Baking, Cookies
Final position - Book, Make, Duck, Kick
That's all well and good but what happens when your child IS making the “k” sound, but they’re saying it consistently at the beginning but not the end?
That, my friends is where those developmentally appropriate “errors” we talked about at the very beginning come into play. More about that in a minute. First, how about a handy Speech Sound Milestones chart that’s easy to print and throw on the fridge? Coming right up!
Now remember those “processes” I talked about at the very beginning? These are the common errors we expect children to make as they are learning to talk. Sometimes we hear our children speaking and think “that doesn’t sound clear” or “why are they calling the dog a “gog” or a “daw”? It’s a valid concern, but also more than can be explained at the end of a random blog post on speech sounds. For that, it would be best to reach out and chat with us about your concerns. We offer free phone consultations, no pressure. We can’t wait to meet you.
