• Developmental Milestones for Speech and Language
     
    mouth
     
     
    Four-Five years
     
    -understands spatial concepts such as "behind," "next to"
    -understands complex questions
    -speech is understandable but makes mistakes in pronouncing long, difficult, or complex words such as "hippopotamus"
    -says about 200 to 300 different words
    -uses some irregular past tense verbs such as "ran," "fell"
    -describe how to do things, such as painting a picture
    -defines words
    -lists items that belong in a category, such as animals and vehicles
    -answers "why" questions
     
    Five years
     
    -understands more than 2,000 words
    -understands time sequences
    (what happened first, second, third, etc.)
    -carries out a set of three directions
    -understands rhyming
    -engages in conversation
    -sentences can be eight or more words in length
    -uses compound and complex sentences
    -describes objects
     
     
    Developmental information from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communciation Disorders