top of page

Typical Phonological Development

Information on a typically developing child's phonological development up to age 3

  • Phonological development: acquisition of speech sound form and function within a given language system

    • intricately connected to overall growth in language​

  • Speech sound development: the gradual articulatory mastery of speech sound forms within a given language

    • Every child is different

Prelinguistic period: all vocalizations prior to the first word​

There is overlap between the stages and every child is different.

​

Infants start to pay attention to voice and speech and learn prior to birth.

The may learn:

  • Categorical perception: the tendency to perceive speech sounds according to the phonemic categories of their native language

    • categorical perception of /b/ and /p/ as early as 1 month of age

  • Discrimination of non-native sounds: discrimination between non-native sounds that are similar in their production characteristics

    • ​infants 6-8 months could discriminate these sounds

    • even sounds adults could not discriminate​

    • 6-12 months these discrimination abilities decrease (but discrimination of native speech sounds increases

  • Perceptual constancy: the ability of infants to identify a sound as being the same across different speakers, pitches, and other changing environmental conditions

    • 5;5-10 months​

  • Perception of phonemic contrasts: differentiate phonemes that signal differences in word meanings

    • 18-23 month old children recognize cor​rectly pronounced and mispronounced words

  • Early perceptual abilities related to language development and disorders:​

    • early perceptual abilities are related to later language development​

Prelinguistic Stages

Birth - 2 months

  • First stage of prelinguistic period​

  • Reflexive vocalizations: crying, coughs, grunts and burps

    • automatic responses reflecting the physical state​

  • Vegetative sounds: grunts, sighs, clicks

    • noises associated with feeding​

1 - 4 months

  • Second stage of babbling period: Cooing and laughter or controlled phonation

  • Mostly vowel like sounds, nasalized vowels and nasal consonants

  • Syllabic nasal consonant

  • Decrease in crying at 12 weeks

  • Vegetative sounds start to disappear 

  • Sustained laughter at 16 weeks

3 - 8 months

  • Babbling is one of the predictors of later language ability​

    • quantity and diversity of vocalizations

    • greater language growth seen in children with more contoid-babble compared to those with more vocoid-babble

    • greater babble complexity often leads to greater language growth​

    • greater language growth is related to the increased diversity of contoid productions

  • Third stage of babbling period: Vocal play (or expansion)

  • Extreme variations in loudness and pitch

  • Longer strings of sound segments, prolonged vowel and consonant-like productions

  • Transition between segments is slower and incomplete

  • More variation in tongue height and position

  • Patterns of prosody at 6 months: intonation, rhythm, and pausing

​

  • Fourth stage of babbling period: Basic canonical babbling

  • Canonical babbling: reduplicated and non-reduplicated babbling

    • Reduplicated babbling: similar strings of consonant-vowel productions

      • might be slight variations in vowel sounds, but consonants stay the same from syllable to syllable​

      • ex. /gaga/

    • Non-reduplicated babbling: aka variegated babbling. Variation of both vowel-like and consonant-like realizations with typically smooth transitions between them

      • ex. /batə/​

  • At the beginning of the state, babbling is used in a self-stimulatory way, not communicative​

  • At the end of the stage, may be used in ritual imitation games with adults

  • Beginning of imitative behavior

5 - 10 months

  • Joint Visual Attention (JVA): follows visual direction of adults gaze or points or shows an object to an adult

    • reliably engages in JVA at 10 months​

  • Some word comprehension is evident around 7-9 months

  • Prosodic features of intentional communication

  • 10-12 months: falling contour only. flat or level contour can be accompanied by falsettos or variations in duration and loudness

  • 13-15 months: requests, gets attention, curious, surprise, recognizes, insists, greets. Rising contour.

  • Prior to 18 months: playful anticipation, emphatic stress, high rising and high rising-falling contour

  • Around 18 months: warnings, playfulness, rising-falling and falling-rising contour.

9 - 18 months

  • Stage 5 of babbling: Advanced forms

  • Last babbling stage

  • Jargon: strings of babbled utterances modulated by intonation, rhythm, and pausing

    • includes eye contact, gestures​, and intonation

  • Overlaps with the first meaningful word

  • Vocoids: nonphonemic vowel-like production

  • Contoids: nonphonemic consonant-like productions

    • Most frequent: [h], [d], [w], [b], [g], [j], and [m]​

      • Account for the majority of contoids babbled

  • Expresses 50-100 words at 18 months

  • Diphthongs appear

  • More complex syllables produced, such as CCV and CCVC

    • ex. "play" /pweI/​ and balloon /bwun/

  • Open syllables are the most frequent type

  • Requests information, answers questions, and acknowledges a response between 16 and 23 months

  • Transition from babbling to first words:

    • mostly monosyllabic utterances​

    • frequent use of stops followed by nasals and fricatives

    • bilabial and apical productions

    • rarely use consonant clusters

    • frequent use of central, mid-front, and low-front vowels

      • /​ʌ, ɛ, æ/

Linguistic Development: The First-50-Word Stage

  • Linguistic development starts with the first word

  • This stage begins with the first word and ends when the child begins the two-word stage (approx. 18-24 months)

    • The First Word: relatively stable phonetic form, produced consistently in a particular context, recognizably related to the adult-like word form

      • [ba] consistently in the context of a ball would count as a first word​

    • Proto-words: aka phonetically consistent forms, vocables, or quasiwords. Consistently used vocalizations showing no similarity to an adult model

  • Presystematic stage: contrastive words rather than contrastive phones are acquired

    • Item learning: children first acquire word forms as unanalyzed units, or productional wholes

      • Holophrastic period: early portion of item learning state. The child uses one word to indicate a complete idea​

    • System learning: after 50 word stage, they start to acquire the phonemic principles of the phonological system

  • Phonetic variability, limitation of syllable structures, and limitation of sound segments are common during this stage

  • Phonetic variability: unstable pronunciations noted in many children’s first 50 words. Not all children do this.

  • Phonological regression: aka phonological idioms. Accurate sound productions later replaced by inaccurate ones.

  • Syllable types common: CV, VC, and CVC

    • CVCV decrease during this time​

  • Reduplication common

  • Children use pitch variations to indicate a difference in meaning

  • Children use contrastive stress at beginning of this stage

    • intonational changes develop prior to stress​

  • At the end of this stage, the child can produce approximately 50 words and can understand around 200 words

    • The first 50 words are predictive of abilities later on​

  • The stage ends when child begins putting two words together

  • Discontinuity hypothesis (Jakobson, 1968): emphasized a sharp separation between prelinguistic behavior and linguistic development. However...

    • Babbling behavior is not random, but develops in a systematic manner​

    • consonant-like sounds that are babbled are restricted to a smell set

    • transition between babbling and first word is not sudden but continuous

      • late babbling and first words are similar in sounds and the way they are combined​

  • Children in this stage often have a larger inventory of sounds in the word-initial position than word-final

  • Common word-initial: [b, d, t, k, m, n, w, s]

  • Common word-final: [t, k, n, s]

  • Sounds typically first appear the in word-initial position (it is easier for the child)

  • Anterior stops and nasals are acquired earlier

  • The average 17 year old knows more than 60,000 words

  • Contrastive stress first evidenced at beginning of two-word stage or at 1;6. 

Preschool-Age

18 - 24 months

  • Expressive vocabulary triples from 50 words to 150 - 300 words

    • Expresses 200-300 words at 24 months​

  • Receptive vocabulary grows from 200 to 1200 words

  • Transition from one-word utterances to two-word sentences

  • Should be saying at least nouns and verbs

  • 70% accuracy of these vowels: [ɑ], [ʊ], [i], [I], and [ʌ] at 18 months

    • but correct vowel production ranges from 23% to 71%​

  • Phonological processing: use of sounds in one's language in processing written and oral language

    • analyze sound structures into smaller units​

    • includes: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonological working memory, and retrieving phonological information from long-term memory

    • Coding: translation from one form to another

      • ex. from written to auditory​

  • Phonological awareness: ability to pay attention to the sound structure of language separate from the meaning

    • detect and manipulate sound segments​

    • uses the auditory modality

    • subdivision of phonological processing

  • Phonemic awareness: understanding that speech is composed of minimal units of sound that can be separated and manipulated 

    • subdivision of phonological awareness​

  • Phonological memory: coding information phonologically for temporary storage in working memory

24 - 36 months

  • Syntax and morphemes emerge

    • ex. present progressive -ing verb​ form

    • ex. plural s

  • Prepositions, like "in" and "on" appear

  • By 24 months, the only vowels that are not 70% accurate are [ɝ] and [ɚ]

    • not until 48-53 months that accuracy of rhotic vowels is above 90%​

  • Aquire all vowels by age 3 with virtually no errors

  • Talks about absent objects

  • Irregular past tense verbs appear around 30 months

    • ex. "I went home"​

  • Possessive s appears around 30 months

    • ex. "mom's shirt"​

  • Syllable structures noted by 24 months: CVC, CVCVC, CCVC, CVCC, CC(C)VCC​

  • Stops and fricatives substituted for [θ] and [ð]

  • Gliding and palatal fronting also seen

4 years

  • Unstressed syllable deletion and cluster reduction suppressed by 4

  • Final consonant deletion can last until 4;6

  • Stable performance of phonological awareness tasks

  • Children with phonological awareness skills learn to read more easily than children without those skills

  • Phonological awareness tasks in Kindergarten and first grade is a strong predictor of later reading achievement

  • Direct training on phonological awareness and sound-letter correspondence with children who can't yet read improves their reading and spelling skills

  • Teaching phonological awareness works best when combined with teaching sound-letter correspondence

  • By the time a child goes to Kindergarten, they have an expressive vocabulary of approximately 2200 words and can understand about 8000 words

5 years

  • All basic grammatical forms, such as questions, negative statements, dependent clauses, and compound sentences

  • Mastery of clusters can take up to age 5;6

  • Can consistently perform phoneme detection tasts

Bauman-Wängler, J. A. (2020). Articulation and phonology in speech sound disorders: a clinical focus (6th ed.). Hoboken: Pearson Education.

Age Levels for Speech Sound Development
According to Smit (1993b)

  • 2: /m, n, p, b, t, k, g, w, h/

  • 3: /d, f/

  • 3;6: /j, ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/

  • 4: /ŋ, v/

  • 4;6: /ð/

  • 5;6: /l, θ/

  • 6: /s, z/

  • 7: /r/

early 8.jpg
bottom of page