When do babies express one-word utterances?

By Ruta Rosset, Speech and Language Pathologist

As children develop, they learn to speak and use language. Below you will find a summary of the expressive language skills children generally attain at key milestones in their development.

Birth

Newborn babies make sounds that let others know they are experiencing pleasure or pain.

0-3 months

Your baby smiles at you when you come into view. They repeat the same sound a lot and “coos and goos” when content. Cries differentiate, meaning that the baby uses a different cry for different situations. For example, one cry says “I’m hungry,” and another says “I have a pain.” At this time, you can begin interpreting and verbalizing these cries for the baby to hear. For example, “you want milk,” or “your tummy hurts.”

4-6 months

Gurgling sounds or vocal play occur while you are playing with your baby or when they are occupying themselves happily.

Babbling really gets going in this age range, and your baby will sometimes sound as though they are talking. Have fun repeating your baby’s sound and taking turns in conversation. The speech-like babbling includes many sounds including bilabial (two lip) sounds: “p,” “b,” “w” and “m.”

Using sounds and gestures, your baby can tell you that they want something or want to do something. They can make very urgent sounding noises to spur you into action.

7-12 months

The sound of your baby’s babbling changes. This is because it now includes more consonants, as well as long and short vowels. They use speech or other sounds (other than crying) in order to get your attention and hold on to it. 

At this time, your baby’s first words (probably not spoken very clearly) have appeared: i.e., “mama,” “byebye,” “no.”  Interpret these words for your baby to hear the correct pronunciation (e.g., “baba” = “bottle”).

1-2 years

Now your baby is accumulating more words as each month passes. They will even ask two-word questions like “where ball?”, “what that?”, “more cookie?”, and combine two words in other ways to make a variety of statements. Words become clearer as more initial consonants are used. 

Again, repeat their utterances and add a word or two to expand. For example, respond with “you want more milk” when hearing “more milk” or “no more doggie, doggie went outside” to “no doggie.”

2-3 years

Your two or three-year-old’s vocabulary is exploding. They seem to have a word for almost everything. Utterances are often one, two or three words long and family members can usually understand them. Keep adding more information to your toddler’s utterances as this helps develop both their receptive and expressive language.

3-4 years

Sentences are becoming longer as your child can now combine four or more words. They talk about things that have happened away from home and are interested in talking about pre-school, friends, outings and interesting experiences. Speech is usually fluent and clear and other people can understand most of what your child says.

Give your child time to respond to your questions and comments. They may need more time to formulate their thoughts and find the words to express them.

4-5 years

Your child speaks clearly and fluently in an easy-to-listen-to voice.  They can construct long and detailed sentences (e.g., “We went to the zoo but we had to come home early because mommy hurt her foot”).

These are general norms for language development. Ages and stages may overlap and one child may be faster or slower than another child in their communication development.

If you feel the quality of your child’s interactions or their ability to understand or adequately express themself is a problem, speak to your doctor, your childcare provider, or contact the Toronto Preschool Speech and Language Association for a consultation.

Stages of language acquisition in children

In nearly all cases, children's language development follows a predictable sequence. However, there is a great deal of variation in the age at which children reach a given milestone. Furthermore, each child's development is usually characterized by gradual acquisition of particular abilities: thus "correct" use of English verbal inflection will emerge over a period of a year or more, starting from a stage where vebal inflections are always left out, and ending in a stage where they are nearly always used correctly.

There are also many different ways to characterize the developmental sequence. On the production side, one way to name the stages is as follows, focusing primarily on the unfolding of lexical and syntactic knowledge:

Vocalizations in the first year of life

In particular, the tip of the velum reaches or overlaps with the tip of the epiglottis. As the infant grows, the tract gradually reshapes itself in the adult pattern.

During the first two months of life, infant vocalizations are mainly expressions of discomfort (crying and fussing), along with sounds produced as a by-product of reflexive or vegetative actions such as coughing, sucking, swallowing and burping. There are some nonreflexive, nondistress sounds produced with a lowered velum and a closed or nearly closed mouth, giving the impression of a syllabic nasal or a nasalized vowel.

During the period from about 2-4 months, infants begin making "comfort sounds", typically in response to pleasurable interaction with a caregiver. The earliest comfort sounds may be grunts or sighs, with later versions being more vowel-like "coos". The vocal tract is held in a fixed position. Initially comfort sounds are brief and produced in isolation, but later appear in series separated by glottal stops. Laughter appears around 4 months.

During the period from 4-7 months, infants typically engage in "vocal play", manipulating pitch (to produce "squeals" and "growls"), loudness (producing "yells"), and also manipulating tract closures to produce friction noises, nasal murmurs, "raspberries" and "snorts".

At about seven months, "canonical babbling" appears: infants start to make extended sounds that are chopped up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-like sequences, opening and closing their jaws, lips and tongue. The range of sounds produced are heard as stop-like and glide-like. Fricatives, affricates and liquids are more rarely heard, and clusters are even rarer. Vowels tend to be low and open, at least in the beginning.

Repeated sequences are often produced, such as [bababa] or [nanana], as well as "variegated" sequences in which the characteristics of the consonant-like articulations are varied. The variegated sequences are initially rare and become more common later on.

Both vocal play and babbling are produced more often in interactions with caregivers, but infants will also produce them when they are alone.

No other animal does anything like babbling. It has often been hypothesized that vocal play and babbling have the function of "practicing" speech-like gestures, helping the infant to gain control of the motor systems involved, and to learn the acoustical consequences of different gestures.

One word (holophrastic) stage

At about ten months, infants start to utter recognizable words. Some word-like vocalizations that do not correlate well with words in the local language may consistently be used by particular infants to express particular emotional states: one infant is reported to have used

Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or too broad: "bottle" used only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for a particular bear; "dog" used for lambs, cats, and cows as well as dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping as well as for kicking. These underextensions and overextensions develop and change over time in an individual child's usage.

Perception vs. production

Clever experiments have shown that most infants can give evidence (for instance, by gaze direction) of understanding some words at the age of 4-9 months, often even before babbling begins. In fact, the development of phonological abilities begins even earlier. Newborns can distinguish speech from non-speech, and can also distinguish among speech sounds (e.g. [t] vs. [d] or [t] vs. [k]); within a couple of months of birth, infants can distinguish speech in their native language from speech in other languages.

Early linguistic interaction with mothers, fathers and other caregivers is almost certainly important in establishing and consolidating these early abilities, long before the child is giving any indication of language abilities.

Rate of vocabulary development

In the beginning, infants add active vocabulary somewhat gradually. Here are measures of active vocabulary development in two studies. The Nelson study was based on diaries kept by mothers of all of their children's utterances, while the Fenson study is based on asking mothers to check words on a list to indicate which they think their child produces.

There is often a spurt of vocabulary acquisition during the second year. Early words are acquired at a rate of 1-3 per week (as measured by production diaries); in many cases the rate may suddenly increase to 8-10 new words per week, after 40 or so words have been learned. However, some children show a more steady rate of acquisition during these early stages. The rate of vocabulary acquisition definitely does accelerate in the third year and beyond: a plausible estimate would be an average of 10 words a day during pre-school and elementary school years.

Perception vs. production again

Benedict (1979) asked mothers to keep a diary indicating not only what words children produced, but what words they gave evidence of understanding. Her results indicate that at the time when children were producing 10 words, they were estimated to understand 60 words; and there was an average gap of five months between the time when a child understood 50 words and the time when (s)he produced 50 words.

All of these methods (maternal diaries and checklists) probably tend to underestimate the number of words about young children actually know something, although they also may overestimate the number of words to which they attribute adult-like meanings.

Combining words: the emergence of syntax

During the second year, word combinations begin to appear. Novel combinations (where we can be sure that the result is not being treated as a single word) appear sporadically as early as 14 months. At 18 months, 11% of parents say that their child is often combining words, and 46% say that (s)he is sometimes combining words. By 25 months, almost all children are sometimes combining words, but about 20% are still not doing so "often."

Early multi-unit utterances

In some cases, early multiple-unit utterances can be seen as concatenations of individual naming actions that might just as well have occured alone: "mommy" and "hat" might be combined as "mommy hat"; "shirt" and "wet" might be combined as "shirt wet". However, these combinations tend to occur in an order that is appropriate for the language being learned:

1. Doggy bark
2. Ken water (for "Ken is drinking water")
3. Hit doggy

Some combinations with certain closed-class morphemes begin to occur as well: "my turn", "in there", etc. However, these are the closed-class words such as pronouns and prepositions that have semantic content in their own right that is not too different from that of open-class words. The more purely grammatical morphemes -- verbal inflections and verbal auxiliaries, nominal determiners, complementizers etc. -- are typically absent.

Since the earliest multi-unit utterances are almost always two morphemes long -- two being the first number after one! -- this period is sometimes called the "two-word stage". Quite soon, however, children begin sometimes producing utterances with more than two elements, and it is not clear that the period in which most utterances have either one or two lexical elements should really be treated as a separate stage.

In the early multi-word stage, children who are asked to repeat sentences may simply leave out the determiners, modals and verbal auxiliaries, verbal inflections, etc., and often pronouns as well. The same pattern can be seen in their own spontaneous utterances:

1. "I can see a cow" repeated as "See cow" (Eve at 25 months)
2. "The doggy will bite" repeated as "Doggy bite" (Adam at 28 months)
3. Kathryn no like celery (Kathryn at 22 months)
4. Baby doll ride truck (Allison at 22 months)
5. Pig say oink (Claire at 25 months)
6. Want lady get chocolate (Daniel at 23 months)
7. "Where does Daddy go?" repeated as "Daddy go?" (Daniel at 23 months)
8. "Car going?" to mean "Where is the car going?" (Jem at 21 months)

The pattern of leaving out most grammatical/functional morphemes is called "telegraphic", and so people also sometimes refer to the early multi-word stage as the "telegraphic stage".

Acquisition of grammatical elements and the corresponding structures

At about the age of two, children first begin to use grammatical elements. In English, this includes finite auxiliaries ("is", "was"), verbal tense and agreement affixes ("-ed" and '-s'), nominative pronouns ("I", "she"), complementizers ("that", "where"), and determiners ("the", "a"). The process is usually a somewhat gradual one, in which the more telegraphic patterns alternate with adult or adult-like forms, sometimes in adjacent utterances:

1. She's gone. Her gone school. (Domenico at 24 months)
2. He's kicking a beach ball. Her climbing up the ladder there. (Jem at 24 months).
3. I teasing Mummy. I'm teasing Mummy. (Holly at 24 months)
4. I having this. I'm having 'nana. (Olivia at 27 months).
5. I'm having this little one. Me'll have that. (Betty at 30 months).
6. Mummy haven't finished yet, has she? (Olivia at 36 months).

Over a year to a year and a half, sentences get longer, grammatical elements are less often omitted and less often inserted incorrectly, and multiple-clause sentences become commoner.

Perception vs. production again

Several studies have shown that children who regularly omit grammatical elements in their speech, nevertheless expect these elements in what they hear from adults, in the sense that their sentence comprehension suffers if the grammatical elements are missing or absent.

Progress backwards

Often morphological inflections include a regular case ("walk/walked", "open/opened") and some irregular or exceptional cases ("go/went", "throw/threw", "hold/held"). In the beginning, such words will be used in their root form. As inflections first start being added, both regular and irregular patterns are found. At a certain point, it is common for children to over-generalize the regular case, producing forms like "bringed", "goed"; "foots", "mouses", etc. At this stage, the child's speech may actually become less correct by adult standards than it was earlier, because of over-regularization.

This over-regularization, like most other aspects of children's developing grammar, is typically resistant to correction:

More Information

A good starting point for more information about child language acquisition is the CHILDES web site at CMU, where you can find out about downloading the raw materials of child language research, and also search a specialized child language bibliography.

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