Tracking the developmental milestone of talking is an emotional experience for the parents as they hear their child gradually string words together. So when do baby’s start talking? Tough talking would take some time, baby’s will start communicating through sounds as early as from 2-3 months. Picking up words and forming sentences is one of the developmental milestones, however, not every child will reach this milestone at the same time. Some children learn faster and some take time; what matters is whether the child is showing the proper developments as expected according to their age.
So When Do Baby’s Start Talking?
The First Sounds – from birth till 3 months of age, babies communicate through sounds, particularly crying. With time the baby also develops the art of gurgling or coo-ing. Though they communicate this way, linguists believe that even in such young age they are able to distinguish between similar syllables.
The Babbling – from the 4th to 6th month, the child engages into experimentation with its vocal cords, tongue, teeth and palate in order to bring out some noises. They will string vowels and consonants together like dada or kaka and keep on rolling their tongues and experimenting with different words. At this stage every child babbles the same way, irrespective of the native tongue. From the 7th to 12th month, the babbling will start making sense as the baby tries to imitate the vocal tones and patterns they hear speaking. Talking or reading to the baby is ideal at this stage.
Using Words – From 13th to 18th month, or the when the baby is older than a year, you will notice your baby trying to speak one or two words. It’s important that you keep speaking to your baby since this helps your baby to understand the word as you keep using it repeatedly. The baby may even start using particular tones in order to convey the expression behind the words.
Making Sentences – by the time the child reaches the age range of 19 to 24 months their vocabulary would have increased. Your baby might utter around 50-70 words by now and may even understand more than 200 words. During this time baby’s will learn to string two or three words together in order to make basic sentences or phrases. During this time your baby’s sense of self matures and you will notice your baby talking about what appeals and what does not. It’s most likely to be in broken phrases or short sentences.
The Complete Talker – by the time the child reaches the age of 2-3 years, the vocabulary will have increased almost to 300 words. Your kid would be able to understand pronouns and string verbs and nouns together to form simple complete sentences. And by the age of three, your baby will be able to carry on a simple conversations.
When Do Kids Start Talking – Parent’s Role
Parents play a big role in the speech development of the child and to an extent influence how soon the baby starts talking. More often than not, baby’s with parents who continuously talked to or read to the child will start talking soon that baby’s with low involvement from parents. Baby’s learn a lot from the way the parents talk to them and therefore it’s necessary to communicate with them regularly and teach them new words.
There can be cases where baby’s have speech development delays. In case your baby is suffering from speech development delay, and is not showing any the speech development milestones, you may have to consult a speech-language pathologist. However, this need not be a cause of concern. With some extra help, you will soon start noticing the developmental milestones of speech in your baby.
