Expressive Language Skills
It is the ability to express thoughts, ideas and feelings in spoken language. A child’s verbal skills are based on the number and type of productions based on their developmental and chronological age. Spoken language follows language comprehension (receptive language). A child that has difficulty in verbal communication presents with an expressive language problem. The problem may exist in isolation and/or coexist with a receptive language problem.
| Average Age | Language Development |
|---|---|
| 6 months | Cooing, changes to distinct babbling by introduction of consonants |
| 1 year | Beginning of language understanding; one-word utterances |
| 12–18 months | Single word use; repertoire of 30-50 words (simple nouns, adjectives, and action words), which cannot as yet be joined in phrases but are used one at a time does not use functors (the, and, can, be) necessary for syntax, but makes good progress in understanding |
| 18–24 months | Two-word (telegraphic) phrases ordered according to syntactic rules; vocabulary of 50 to several hundred words; understands propositional rules |
| 2 years | New words every day; three or more words in many combinations; functors (function words) begin to appear; many grammatical errors and idiosyncratic expressions; good understanding of language |
| 3 years | Full sentences; few errors; vocabulary of around 1,000 words |
| 4 years | Close to adult speech competence |
| Courtesy of Neurobiology of Language | |
