Is This Normal? (Speech Edition)

All children develop differently and “normal” is relative. Even so, it can be helpful to know the ages that children typically master certain skills, or grow out of certain speech patterns, to help you decide whether to seek speech therapy for your child. Check out the chart below and, if you notice that your child doesn’t use a number of sounds that they “should” be using at their age, or if they are still using patterns in their speech that “should” be eliminated, it might be time to reach out to your local speech language pathologist.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive or used as the sole resource when determining whether speech is developing typically. Keep in mind that certain errors can have a greater impact on intelligibility (how well your child is understood by others) than other errors. Additionally, there are some error patterns (not listed in the chart below) that are not seen during the course of typical development. These non-typical speech patterns include saying “ip” for “lip” (initial consonant deletion), saying “goor” for door (backing), saying “yee” for see (gliding fricatives), and using glottal sounds (throaty/grunting sound) in the place of any other sound. If you notice your child using these patterns, I recommend seeking speech therapy as they are less likely to resolve naturally. 

The information in this chart is from the following references: Hustad et al. (2021) for intelligibility data, McLeod & Crowe (2018) for age of acquisition.