Developmental Milestones

Developmental communication milestones help track a child's progress in understanding and expressing language. From early cooing and babbling to forming sentences and engaging in conversations, these milestones provide key indicators of speech and language development. While every child progresses at their own pace, delays in meeting these milestones may signal the need for additional support to build essential communication skills.

Milestones Questionnaire

Month by Month

    • Turns head to sound, respons to voices

    • Watches a speaker’s face

    • Social smile emerges by 2 months

    • Vowel sounds and cooing emerge around 2 months

    • Enjoys social games and playful interactions with the caregiver

    • Takes turns vocalizing Makes eye contact with people talking to them

    • Cooing, vowel sounds, yelling, squealing, and shrieking

    • CV syllable shapes with /p, b, m/ sounds, ex: puh, bah, muh

    • Reduplicated babbling (ex: mamama)

    • Understands a few words and phrases Imitates some simple actions and sounds

    • Joint attention emerges

    • Responds to name when called

    • Communicates with vocalizations and eye contact, may use some early gestures (ex: reaching for items, pushing things away)

    • Babbling with a variety of consonant and vowels sounds

    • Pointing and using other early gestures like waving and clapping

    • Understands ~50 words and phrases

    • Imitates simple actions with nursery songs

    • Says one word by 12 months

    • Says 5-10 words Babbles in sentence-like strands with adult intonation

    • Uses 10 or more gestures (ex: waves, points, claps, reaches to be picked up, smacks lips to eat)

    • Imitates sounds in play (ex: moo, vrrm, aww, choo choo!)

    • Follows one-step directions with adult help and prompts (ex: "give it to me", "come here")

    • Says 50-200 words

    • Speech is 25-50% intelligible

    • Answers simple questions and selects an item when given a choice of two

    • Combines words for phrases

    • Uses words more than gestures to communicate

    • Follows simple two-step directions

    • Uses phrases and sentences that are 2-4 words long on average

    • Robust spoken vocabulary with many nouns, verbs, descriptive words, and words for simple concepts (ex: in, out, up, down)

    • Speech is 50-75% intelligible

    • Asks and answers simple questions (ex: Who, What, Where, & What Doing?)

    • Understands increasingly complex directions that include concepts like "on", "off", "big", "little", and "under"