Baby Care

Sixteen months old child clearly understands almost everything that you say, even if his/her own speech still resembles “mumbo jumbo”. The ability to understand spoken language is an important step toward the own speech activity.

Stages of Speech Development

As with other skills, there is no clearly defined age and mastering the mechanism of speech. There are 16 months old children who hardly pronounce a few words and the other 16 months old include up to twenty words in vocabulary. Articulator skills of the child are not developed yet, and often the pronunciation of the kid is understandable only to his/her parents.

First words

The child’s first words are a kind of labels – nouns to describe people, animals and all other items affecting the baby. At first, he/she learns to speak the simple one or two words, and then move on to phrases. During this period, on average, a child learns two or three words each month. Then, suddenly – as a rule, in eighteen months(plus-minus two months) the kid is going through a so-called “voice breakthrough”, after which learns ten words every day and improve the skills of perception of speech with even greater intensity.

When a child learns well a few words, he/she will try to express his/her thoughts more precisely. Initially, he/she will use the intonation. For example, when he/she learns to pronounce the word “cat”, he will shout “cat!”, when the cat will be digging in a flower pot – because earlier he/she had heard that you criticize your pet for it.

Sentence Formation

Finally, the child will understand how to put string small beads of his/her growing vocabulary to short strings of sentences. At first he/she is not concerned with “unnecessary” words like prepositions and conjunctions – these official words are meaningless for him/her.

But he/she is pleased with the combination of the words that have meaning for him/her. For example, if a kid “catches” cat again for eating his/her favorite geraniums, he/she won’t say “You are a bad cat!”, but he/she will say “Bad cat!”

Experts call these initial inexpert sentences “telegraphic speech”. They usually consist of two words. These sentences indicate a new level of communication between the child and the world. For example, a child may rush to the window and cry “Dad home!”, seeing the approaching of his/her father, or shout “Swing!”, being on the playground.

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