Speech and Language Milestones for Babies (12-24 Months)

This is a period of rapid growth, maturity, and brain development where your child progresses from baby to toddler!

There are many foundational verbal and nonverbal skills that build upon each other throughout your baby's second year. Knowing each of these milestones, and ensuring that your baby is progressing at a level appropriate for their age, is extremely important to raising an effective communicator.

Receptive language skills (12-18 months)

• Responding to their name: You should notice that your baby begins to respond to their own name around the one year mark. 
• Follow simple directions: In this stage, your baby should also begin demonstrating the ability to follow simple one-step directions. This can be things like, “Come here,” “Sit down”, “Give me ball”.
• Independent Play: As a general rule, your child should be able to engage in some kind of independent play activity for at least 1-2 minutes before switching tasks. Reading books is a perfect example. Your child should be able to sit long enough to engage with you and the book. They may even begin pointing to pictures in the book when asked.
• Functional Play: During this stage, your child should begin to play with and use objects appropriately. For example, they may hold a phone up to their ear, place a hairbrush on their head, or pretend to drink from a toy cup.

Expressive language skills (12-18 months)

• Saying "no":  At this age, toddlers like to express their new found independence, everything is, “No!” You will likely begin to hear more words as well, although some children wait until later on in the second year to produce additional vocabulary. 
• Spontaneous utterances: A toddler should be able to spontaneously say something like “Milk!” when thirsty, or “Ball!” when they want to play. 
• Consonant sounds: Your toddler should also start to use several different consonant sounds in their words or babbles. The earliest developing sounds include /b/ /p/ /m/ /n/ and /d/. Children in this age range should be able to produce most of these consonants independently.

Receptive language skills (18-24 months)

• Comprehension skills: Between the ages of 18 and 24 months, your child should undergo a big jump in their comprehension abilities. Children should be able to understand at least 50 different words spoken to them. They may not be able to say all of these words, but they should at least comprehend them. A toddler should be able to point to named common object. 
• Appropriate Play: Your child will start to play more appropriately with two objects together like pretending to mix a spoon in a bowl, or giving a baby doll a bottle. Similarly, you should see your child start to use objects toward themselves and others. Your toddler may pretend to feed you or brush your hair.
• Eye contact: Initiating and maintaining eye contact during social interactions is another skill that should occur during this age-range. If you do not notice regular eye contact, be sure to speak with your pediatrician.

Expressive language skills (18-24 months)

• Increased vocabulary: By 18-24 months, your child should have at least 5-10 words that they use regularly and spontaneously. It is likely that they will have more vocabulary in their word bank. They should also continue to readily imitate words as well.
• Consonant-vowel combinations: 
• When your child imitates or uses words, there are different combinations of consonants and vowels you may hear. For example, you may hear a consonant-vowel production (CV production), as in “Go” or even an approximation of the word “more” as “ma.” You may also hear consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel productions (CVCV productions), like “baba” for bottle. And finally, you may even hear some emerging consonant-vowel-consonant productions (CVC productions) like “mom.” As your child grows, their word approximations will begin sounding more and more like true words.
• Two-word phrases: There's a chance that some toddlers in this age range will begin to use very simple two word phrases, like “ball please,” “More milk.” Most children will meet this goal at, or just past, the age 2 years old.
• Use simple phrases, such as "more milk"
• Ask one- to two-word questions, such as "Go bye-bye?”
• Speak about 50 or more words
• Speak well enough to be understood at least half the time by you or other primary caregivers

You can help your child talk more

If there's one thing every caregiver should know about promoting and increasing their child’s language skills, it's this: Talk and play together every day! The time spent investing in your child’s development is priceless. Not to mention, it can be a lot of fun for both of you! Learning to communicate is a big job for such little kids. Just knowing what to watch for will help them achieve and exceed necessary communication skills.

If you’re concerned that your child isn’t meeting their speech and language milestones, schedule an assessment now