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Although
some children are precocious in the acquisition of speech
and may be able to produce understandable speech by the time
they are 30 months of age, in some children, it is not uncommon
for one or two speech sounds to remain "unlearned"
until 72 months of age. By the time a child is 48 months old,
however,  she
should be speaking well enough to be understood all of the
time. See Speech and
Language Milestones Checklists. As the child matures
from the babbling baby to the competent speaker, she eliminates
from her speech the babbled sounds which are not common to
her environment, making judgments based on listener feedback
to select patterns of speech which are continually fine tuned
and eventually generalized. The child unwittingly learns to
pair, and then group, speech sounds which share characteristics.
For example, /t/ and /d/, are paired because they are both
produced when the tongue tip strikes the hard palate behind
the teeth and produces a little explosion of air. Though made
in the back of the mouth with the soft palate raised to strike
the back throat wall, /k/ and /g/ are grouped with /t/ and
/d/ because of the explosion of air resulting when they are
made. Besides such groupings of speech sounds, the child also
learns that words have shapes made of consonant and vowel
sounds and these sounds are patterned in certain ways.
| The
acquisition of speech occurs the same way for children
all over the world... |
The acquisition of speech
occurs the same way for children all over the world, and at
each chronological age along the developmental continuum,
one can predict what developmental features should be present.
A fourteen-month-old child, for example, may produce [naena]
for banana, while the two-year-old child may say [baena],
and the three-year-old child may finally say banana.
See Speech
and Language Milestones Checklists. The process of developing
speech, called developmental phonology, may be slower than
expected, arrested, or idiosyncratic, all of which would be
considered a developmental speech disorder/delay.
Not to
be confused with developmental speech delay, is developmental
apraxia or (dyspraxia).
This is a condition which affects the child’s ability
to plan, sequence and execute the movements necessary for
speech. The child may also have difficulty receiving sensory
feedback regarding the placement of the articulators for speech.
Go to What
is a Language Disorder?
Brendan
O’Connor Webster, M.A., CCC
Speech
and Language Pathologist
Executive Director
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