People begin to learn language just when there an infant. Children learn language with no effort at all even though it’s a very complicated skill. A child learns 3,000 words a year, while a person will speak 370 million words in a life time.

 When you’re a baby we listen to people around us and pick up on things we hear. People have found out that before a child has said its first word it has already started learning the rules for language. It takes about 2 years for a child to say it’s first word, before then you just here normal baby noises like ‘ahhh’ and things like this. These signs are good though, it just means it’s learning to say words.

The very first way a baby will communicate to you is through crying and screaming very loud letting you know there’s something wrong. A baby will respond to the mother’s voice because that’s who the baby has heard every day for the past months.

Many people say children learn to communicate by imitating other people but this isn’t completely true. They imitate people’s sentence structure and verbs, so they can make their own sentences. For example, you might hear your child say things that you haven’t heard before like “Mum, I’m going to sit on the swing while eating my pretzel.” This isn’t a common sentence that you would hear and imitate, and by looking at things children say like this, it helps prove they don’t just copy what we say.

At the age of 6 months a child will respond to their name, respond to human voices with eyes and turning their head, respond appropriately to friendly and angry tones. 12 months use one or more words with meaning, understand simple instructions and practices inflection. In 24 months they can name a lot of object and can combine words into short sentences. Then right up to 8 years where they now can follow very complex directions, control rate pitch and are now very well developed in the world of language.