Language Development in Babies

One of the subjects that parents read most, research and worry about is the language development of their children. Language development, which starts from birth, is an important part of the learning process.

Let's examine the step-by-step language development processes:

• Preschool period (0-5 age range) plays an important role in the acquisition of language skills.

• Studies show that babies can easily distinguish the language spoken by self-care providers from a foreign language when they are only 2 months old.

When babies are 2 to 5 months old, they make sounds that express their satisfaction with the situation, especially when interacting socially with self-caregivers.

Between 5 and 8 months, you can now witness your baby making monosyllable sounds using vowels and consonants. Your baby's first understandable words appear on average at 12 months of age.

While 18-month-old babies are expected to have a vocabulary of 40 words on average, this number increases to 200 for 2-year-old babies. we can see the importance of talking to babies and reading to them in terms of language development.

Just as we often use the sentence “I understand, but I have trouble speaking” while learning a new foreign language; Babies also understand words and phrases spoken to them long before they begin to speak. That's why your child's language development may slow down if you don't talk to your baby or avoid explaining situations to him, thinking "he doesn't understand how".

When babies reach the age of 2.5, they have an average of 200 words, and at the age of 3.5, they have an average of 1000 words. A child who has reached the age of 4.5 is now expected to express himself with proper sentences.

If we want to contribute to the language development of our children, it is very important to spend one-on-one time with them. You can read picture books suitable for your child's age, talk about what happens in that fairy tale and what the characters do.