If you’re a professional working on building language skills; you’ve most likely taken a language development course at some point in your training.
As an SLP, knowing norms for language development is the foundation for understanding how to diagnose and treat problems in this area.
Yet I regularly hear discussions in professional forums debating what “normal” language development is; especially when it comes to school age children.
This has been a topic of particular interest lately in my premium program for SLPs treating students with academic language disorders in school age, Language Therapy Advance.
For the younger kids, it’s a little more straightforward, because we have a decent amount of information available for language development from birth through about Kindergarten age.
There are quite a few easy-to-read charts with information on this age range.
There is even a school of thought that MOST of language development happens by this age (Lenneberg, 1967). But those of us who work with children in Kindergarten through high school (and beyond) know otherwise.
With the large amount of cognitive growth that’s still happening, many of the things that emerge in the earlier years are being fine-tuned. We’re able to become even more flexible with how we use language (Dahl, 2004; Nippold, 2016).
So the problem that comes up time and time again is that even though we have a pretty good understanding what’s going on during those early years when we establish a foundation; there isn’t a lot of information and nice, neat language development charts that go beyond 5 or 6 years.
And if you’re someone who is supposed to diagnose or treat students struggling with language, that makes your job pretty challenging.
Then, there’s another problem. And this is the reason why you won’t find many age charts for later language development. As Walter Loban (1976) put it in his longitudinal study of language development in children from Kindergarten through 12th grade (p. 93):
“Drawing up a valid art chart of sequence and stages is hazardous; at any one age children vary tremendously in language ability.”
Pinpointing an exact age it a perfect chart just doesn’t work when there are so many factors coming in to play (e.g., environment, topic interest, being in a household that speaks more than one language). The concept of “normal” starts to get fuzzy; at we can’t always quantify when a student “knows” a particular linguistic skill.
But of course, that doesn’t mean we have NO information.
Which is why I’m going to be diving deep in to the topic of language development through the school years, as well as the language that’s expected in the curriculum throughout the school years in the coming articles.
In this post, we’re going to start at birth and go up to Kindergarten. We have to start here to understand how the entire process unfolds; as well as how to move back in sequence for school age children who still aren’t solid with these early developing language skills.
Then we’ll move up through the school years and talk about all the most meaningful skills that children learn when it comes to language developments.
When you enter a search for “language developmental milestones”, we get over two million search results; with the top ones being reputable sources such as ASHA or MayoClinic.
So let’s start out with those early milestones and start sifting the massive amount of information out there.
Language development in the first 24 months
In the first year and a half, one of the primary developments is intentionality. Children go from the perlocutionary stage; where caregivers are inferring meanings of behaviors, to the illocutionary stage where behaviors become intentional.
This could include more differentiated types of crying and fussing, pointing or showing an object, or an increase in joint attention. Then, at the locutionary stage we see true words emerge, in addition to understanding cause/effect relationships (Kuder, 2018).
An interesting rhetorical question here; how many school-age children do you know who STILL struggle with cause and effect?
Of course, by the time we get to school age, the understanding of causality becomes much more dependent on how well we understand abstract language; but it’s interesting to see how early this cognitive skill emerges.
Now let’s move on to the first year. Many children will have some real words at this time.
We also see object permanence and symbolic play start to emerge between 18-24 months (Kuder, 2018).
In my language development course, I saw object permanence explained with a teddy bear and a blanket; and of course a 1-2 year old child.
The caregiver showed the child a teddy bear. Then they covered the teddy bear with the blanket.
Children who reached for the blanket to find the teddy bear, realizing that it still existed even when it was covered and not in plain sight had developed a sense of object permanence.
When kids develop a sense of symbolic play, they understand that objects can represent other actions; such as pretending a block is a car by pushing it around the floor.
A significant amount of syntactic development happens during this time, and kids typically have an MLU of 1.0-2.0 (Bowen, 2016).
The following syntactic structures start to develop (Kuder, 2018):
Nomination: “That dog.”
Recurrence: “More cookie”
Negation: “No juice.”
Agent + Action: “Mommy go.”
Action + Agent: “Eat cookie.”
Agent + Object: “Puppy food.” (The puppy eats food.)
Possessor + Possession: “Daddy hat.” (Daddy’s hat.)
Entity + Attributive: “Cup blue.” (The cup is blue.)
Demonstrative + Entity: “This truck.”
Language development from ages 2-3
Between 2-3 years of age, true morphological development begins.
Then, when you consider that we are expecting children to read and write these forms (when some of them don’t have them consistent in oral language); it starts to make sense why they are struggling.
At the beginning of the second year, children may be in Brown’s stage 2 (MLU 2.0-2.5). Present progressive tense, prepositional phrases, regular plurals, and regular past tense also emerge (Merritt, 2016).
Children also move through Brown’s stage 3 towards the end of the second year/beginning of the third year (MLU 2.5-3.0). Stage 3 is when true sentence forms emerge (Bowen, 2016).
With this rapid increase in syntactic development; we see children use sentences with negation, imperatives, questions, noun phrases, and verb phrases (Kuder, 2018).
Reflect back on your students with disabilities here. How many of them are STILL struggling to use/comprehend negation? Or basic question structure?
For those of us working with older children; remembering these early developments can really highlight the differences between students with typically developing language skills vs. those with diagnosed disabilities.
Many of us find that many of our students do not have consistent use with a lot of these rules even during the school-age years; which explains why school is so difficult for them.
Language development from ages 3-5
Between 3-4 years, children go through Brown’s stage 4 (MLU 3.0-3.75). This is where complex sentences emerge. Children start embedding subordinate clauses within independent clauses or conjoining clauses using conjunctions.
Most children also progress through stage 5 (MLU 3.75-4.5). During this stage, we don’t see a significant amount of new structures; but the ones already there are refined and expanded (Bowen, 2016).
Once we get to 4-5 years, we start to get to the point that MLU starts to become less meaningful for those children who are beyond stage 5.
For children who are delayed, however it could still be useful because it may still show meaningful changes.
From 4-5 years, children continue to refine earlier forms; and we still may see some lingering grammatical errors. We also see growth in pragmatic language; such as an increase in the use of turn-taking; although they may still interrupt and have difficulty explaining past events with enough detail for the listener (Merritt, 2016).
Language development from ages 5-6
Pragmatic development continues to grow during the 5th year, and children become better at conversations; but may still have a hard time if there are three or more people participating in a conversation at once. We see children continue to refine their morphosyntactic skills as well.
Children can tell simple stories, but stories lack background knowledge needed by the listener. They’re starting to learn how to explain what happened “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” and can engage in conversational exchanges using 5-8 word utterances between (Merritt, 2016).
This is when most children enter Kindergarten. This is a defining point; because now not only do we need to know how language development happens, but we also need to know curricular standards and what’s expected of kids in school.
That’s why in the next article, I’ll talk about language development and curricular standards. I’ll also talk about what to do when you’re expect to align your interventions with the curriculum, but you have students’ whose language skills fall well below grade level.
I’ll also keep going up through school age through adolescence in the upcoming articles, but if you want to jump ahead you can check out this glossary with some of the key terms I’ll be addressing.
But at this point, there are a couple things we can take away from this information:
A lot of the language skills we’re working on with school-aged children who are struggling SHOULD start to emerge way earlier. So we need to be familiar with these early milestones, even if our students are older.
If our kids are behind, we want to move them through these stages of typical development. Which of course means, we need to know how typical language development looks. That means that you may need to find out what stage your student is in by working backwards, and move up from there.
We’re only just beginning; so stay tuned for the articles to come.
To learn more about which language skills are important to track over the school-age years, check out this free glossary for SLPs.
This glossary will help you to:
- Identify the key skills that are relevant to language growth.
- Determine what syntactic skills indicate continued progress.
- Get clarity on which skills are highest priority for academic success and language comprehension.
>>>Click here to sign up for the glossary.<<<
References
Bowen, C. (2016, February). Brown’s stages of syntactic and morphological development. Retrieved from: https://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33:brown&catid=2:uncategorised&Itemid=117
Kuder, S. J. (2018). Teaching students with language and communication disabilities (5th Edition) (The Pearson Communication Sciences and Disorders Series)
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Merritt, D. D. (2016, February). Typical speech and language development for school-age children: A checklist for school nurses. Retrieved from: http://ctserc.org/component/k2/item/130-typical-speech-and-language-development-for-school-age-children
Nippold, M. A. (2016). Later language development: School-age children, adolescents, and young adults
*This page contains affiliate links to Amazon, which means I get a small commission for purchases made using those links.
