1 Year of age
Normal
- Starts recognising own name, few words, simple verbal requests like give me, come here, say bye.
- Begins to imitate actions with objects and few sounds in rhymes
- Responds with vocalisations 50% of time
- Starts engaging in some pretend play
- Uses some exclamations like oh oh
- Vocalises or babbles to gain attention
- Maintains eye contact when spoken to or sung to.
Delayed
- No back and forth sharing of sounds, smiles or other facial expressions by 9 months or thereafter
- Is still making only vowel sounds with no speech like consonants ( e.g aaa, instead of baba or mamama)
- Unable to sustain interest in looking at pictures/objects/rhymes
- Doesn’t understand simple verbal requests
- Fails to recognise family members
- Doesn’t comprehend expressions of joy/anger
2 Years of age
Normal
- Starts recognising more objects and pictures when they are named.
- Develops better attention span in own choice of activities.
- Answers simple questions like Where’s Daddy? What is this?
- Follows simple commands, brings familiar object, gives to another person understands approximately 300 words
- Uses approximately 100 recognisable words
- Begins combining words into simple phrases
- Type of words contain Nouns, verbs, Adjectives communicates for requesting, gaining other’s attention, asking for help
Delayed
- Is not using eye gaze or gestures like pointing or showing, to communicate interests or needs
- Has infrequent eye contact or little interest in interaction
- Does not respond to own name or understand common words
- Is not saying at least 30-40 meaningful words
- Does not follow simple verbal commands
- Is not playing pretend with items (talking on a toy phone, feeding the doll) and does not play in proximity to other children.
3 Years of age
Normal
- Listens to long utterances and appears to understand their meaning
- Takes interest in explanation and why
- Understands most what, where and who questions
- Vocabulary included Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions, and Personal Pronouns
- Carries out two related verbal commands
- Is able to combine words to form simple to compound sentences
- Communicates for requests, assistance, gaining attention, showing, describing, asking for information
- Sentences increase in length but may not be grammatically correct
- Speech is 60-70 % intelligible
Delayed
- Is not combing words into phrases or sentences spontaneously (without imitating or repeating)
- Does not follow simple 2 step commands such as “Get the ball and give to Daddy”
- Has a limited vocabulary (Nouns, verbs)
- Speech is not at least 50 % understandable
- Cannot answer what/where/who or yes/no questions
- Does not play with other children
- Is doing only need based talking (basic needs) but not showing, gaining attention, asking for information or explanation.
- Is showing signs of stammering, repetition of part words or sounds
4 Years of age
Normal
- Understands questions related to a story and is able to answer them.
- Starts understanding and asking common how and why questions
- is understanding past and present
- Has started narrating past incidents, learns to sequence events.
- Starts combining sentences to form longer utterances
- Starts reasoning, Predicting, showing empathy, creating imaginary roles and maintaining interactions
- Speech is 75% intelligible
- Is able to initiate and take turns in conversation and play with children and adults
Delayed
- Is not able to comprehend stories or conversations
- Is unable to answer or understand questions related to a story
- Does not initiate conversations, speaks only when spoken to or only repeats what others say
- Does not ask questions
- Strangers understand less than half of what the child says
- Cannot participate in conversations or play
- Is leaving the beginnings or ends of most words
- Signs of stammering are persisting or getting worse
- Is unable to narrate past incidents
- Is unable to understand or differentiate between past or present events
5 Years of age
Normal
- Starts listening to longer narratives
- Understands most complex sentences
- Able to understand underlying meaning of language (e.g those smell good)
- Understands Past, present and future concept
- Understands comparative and contrastive sentences
- Able to ask and answer variety of why and how questions
- Narrates incidents sequentially, with central theme and characters
- Able to describe things in their own words
- Able to predict, assume and infer information from spoken language and pictures
- Able to use language for negotiation, explanation, and problem solving.
- Uses more conjunctions like when, so, if, then, because, but
Delayed
- Talks only about here and now, rather than events in the past and future, or about objects/people that are not present
- Puts words in the wrong order in sentences or leaves out little words (in, the, of, is) and word endings (-Ing, -ed, -s)
- Has difficulty following 2 to 3 step instructions
- Is unable to listen to a story and answer questions about it
- Speech is still hard to understand (has multiple sound errors)
- Is not asking or answering a variety of questions (who, what, where, why and when)
- Is unable to participate in simple rule based games with peers
- Is shy or scared to participate in a group due to stuttering
- Has difficulty participating in conversations, take turns, initiate topic of interest