In the first year and a half of life, your baby’s speech will develop astonishingly quickly. It takes just 12 short months for a baby to develop inflection, vowel sounds, consonant sounds, and understood vocabulary– all the basic building blocks of language.
All babies will develop speech differently. Your baby’s specific pattern of growth is as unique as his own fingerprint. However, a baby’s speech will generally follow the same typical pattern. Here are some milestones to look for, in the order in which they usually occur.
1. He communicates as a newborn. Just days after birth, your baby is already able to recognize your voice among a crowd of people. During this stage, his level of communication is primarily instinctive and reflex-based. Different cries may, in this stage, signal different needs. Although others may not be able to tell the difference between these whimpers, your keen maternal ears may be able to discern which problem needs to be addressed.
2. He begins acquiring language at two the three months. At around two to three months, your baby begins to lose his reflex-based communication. Instead, he starts crying with deliberation, and he adds a combination of coos, gurgles, grunts and sighs. These may not seem like language development, but they are a key step in his acquisition of speech.
3. Early babbling starts at four to six months. Your baby’s next step toward language will involve early babbling. This doesn’t yet sound like a real conversation; it mostly contains long strings of vowels such as “oooooohhh—aaaaah” and “yayayayayayayaya” You may begin hearing faint beginnings of real words, such as that tear-jerking, “mama,” but your baby doesn’t yet understand that these sounds represent real people, things or concepts.
4. He begins complex babbling at seven to nine months. By ten months, your baby’s babbling may sound like a real conversation. Instead of repeating the same coo or syllable over and over again, he starts to create nonsense words like, “Munna-guwwa.” He now understands that words have meanings, and can pick out familiar words in conversation. Some babies may use one or two meaningful words at this stage, but many do not.
5. Words have meaning by one year. By the time your baby’s first birthday rolls around, he will probably be using at least one to three words meaningfully. Note that a baby’s development may be somewhat lopsided in terms of physical or verbal development. If your baby is already walking and climbing at 12 months, he may only speak one word. If he has only barely begun crawling, he might speak a dozen words.
6. Speech development kicks into high gear at 18 months. By the time your baby is a year and a half old, he has entered the stage of rapid language acquisition that will continue until his second birthday. Most babies can say at least 10 words by 18 months, and a baby’s vocabulary will increase by an astonishing ten words per day. You may see the beginnings of more complex language, including short sentences like “baby up,” but that stage may not arrive fully until your baby’s second birthday or later.
Your baby’s speech development won’t always fit a predictable mold, and most babies who speak late are perfectly healthy. However, it’s possible that a baby with delayed speech has an underlying hearing problem, sensory processing disorder, or cognitive delay. For this reason, you should talk to his pediatrician if your baby’s speech development concerns you for any reason. Early identification and treatment can often solve or mitigate any underlying developmental problem.
