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- There are multiple steps on the road to the development of language.
- Children babble-make speechlike but meaningless sounds-from around the age of 3 months through 1 year.
An infant's babbling increasingly reflects the specific language being spoken in the infant's environment.
Young infants can distinguish among all 869 phonemes that have been identified across the world's languages.
- After the age of 6 to 8 months, that ability begins to decline and infants begin to "specialize" in their language.
A critical period exists for language development early in life.
- When children are approximately 1 year old, they stop producing sounds that are not in the language.
It is then a short step to the production of actual words.
- After the age of 1 year, children begin to use two-word combinations, and increase their vocabulary.
- By age 3, children learn to make plurals by adding "s" to nouns and to form the past tense by adding "ed" to verbs.
- By age 5, children have acquired the basic rules of language.
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