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 by 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, 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.

WHAT IS A LANGUAGE DISORDER?

Like speech, language develops according to a timetable and in response to cognitive development. Some researchers would even say that language plays a role in shaping cognition. When an object is named, for example, the thinking process about that object is changed to include the attributes of the object that the child has experienced, i.e., shape, structure, taste, smell, color, etc. As the child develops a vocabulary, these words with their underlying meanings are then combined to create utterances according to rules of syntax and grammar. While the child is learning the vocabulary, syntax and grammar of her language, she is also learning the social customs regarding its use. These are internalized as pragmatic rules.

Children whose language development lags significantly from the timetable may be considered developmentally delayed in language acquisition. A child with a language disorder may not use the language commensurate with her peers. She may be delayed in acquiring the vocabulary, syntax, grammar and pragmatics of her age mates. The child may have some of the characteristics of the language expected for her age, say vocabulary, but may be behind in syntax. Another child may have difficulty understanding the pragmatics of language and not know what to say in a given situation, whereas vocabulary may be limited in yet another. These problems in language development may be correlated with problems in later developing language-related areas such as reading.

Go to Language Developement and the Emergence of Reading.

Go to Advice for Parents of Language-Delayed Young Children.

Brendan O’Connor Webster, M.A., CCC
Speech and Language Pathologist
Executive Director

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