Speech Milestones for Children

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Speech Milestones for Children A baby’s first words are music to a parent’s ears. While every child learns to speak at his or her own pace, general milestones can serve as a guide to normal speech and language development. Milestones can also provide a window of opportunity for parents and educators to optimize the development of language and cognition. The production and comprehension of languages seems to be common among human beings, but child language acquisition is a biologically-based process (Fromkin, 62), and there are some critical periods, as the major milestones, during the development. All children acquire language in the same way, regardless of what language they use or the number of languages they use. Acquiring a language is like learning to like learning to play a game. Typically, children learn the rudiments of language by age 3 and master it almost completely by age 10. All human beings, young and old, follow two kinds of learning strategy. One, drawing on physical ability, is that we learn in stages. For example, we make sure we can walk before we run. The other, drawing on intellectual ability, is that we generalize from past experience. For instance, if you see an insect that you never saw before and that looks like a cockroach you are likely to think it may be a cockroach. These strategies help us explain child productions in the whole of language, from pronunciation through vocabulary and grammar to skills like how to hold a conversation. The basic insight that we gain from children’s developing pronunciation is that there are easy sounds and difficult sounds, and easy and difficult distinctions between sounds. Every infant cries at the moment they came to the world, and they can make some vegetative sounds in the first month. They will start to cooing, such as making sounds of “woo” and “ah”, around one to two months, and
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