Simple guideline to determine your child’s speech development.

Simple guideline to determine your child's speech development.

With this simple guideline, roughly you'll know whether your child is having speech language delay or not.

Introduction.

Before your child got their first word at around 1 year old, they must have been practicing to play with the basic of speech sounds. This is what we called, the babbling stage which is after the vocalizing stage. At the vocalizing stage, babies just play with vowels sounds for example like, /a/, /i/, /u/, /o/ and /e/ sounds. Lots of other vowels sounds can derive from those basic 5 sounds.

The second stage of speech development is the babbling stage. At this stage (which can start from as early as 3 months old), your child will use more of their speech muscles like lips, cheeks, tongue and soft palate to make and play with consonants sounds. They'll start from the most ‘front sound' which is the lips, like the /b/, /p/ and /m/ sound. After that, the ‘teeth sound' like the /t/, /d/ and /n/. Then, go further inside, the ‘center of the tongue' sound like /ch/ and /jh/ sound. Followed by the ‘back of the tongue' sound like /k/ and /g/ sound. And lastly other type of consonant sounds. After playing with nearly all those sounds, then they'll produce their first word.

Simple guideline.

Minimum requirement for 1 year old child is at least they can produce several vocabularies spontaneously. 1 word utterances. No sentence made yet.

For 2 years old child, at least they can say in a simple sentence, 2 word in a sentence spontaneously. For example, "I want", "mummy eat" etc.

For 3 years old, 3 words in a sentence; "I want fish", "lets go home" etc.

For 4 years old, 4 words in a sentence; "I want to eat", "mummy, where is daddy" etc.

For 5 years old and above, at least 5 words in a sentence. At this age, they also must at least know how to tell a simple past event story. For example, they can tell you if they got pinched by his/her brother; "mummy, Alex pinched my nose!"

Conclusion.

There you go, the simple guideline revealed. If a 4 years old child just able to produce only 2 words in a sentence, then we can say, that child is delayed 2 steps behind. So the parents have to take action to stimulate the child's language. We can discuss later about the language stimulations. Happy assessing! ;-)