Using first words

Children typically acquire first words around the age of 12 months. Their vocabulary bank grows fairly steadily between the ages of one to two.

By two they should be using around 50 (or more) single words and be starting some easy two word phrases such as "my cup", "daddy car" (meaning "Daddy's in in the car" or "daddy's car", "more juice" etc. By the age of two, their speech should be understood about 50% of the time.

By age three, a child's speech and language skills have dramatically increased. We call this the "language explosion"!!! They should be able to use a variety of: nouns (naming words), describing words, verbs (action words) in various tenses, pronouns (eg. I, me, my, you).