Phonological development stages
  • Early perception of speech sounds (1-4 months) Babbling shades into early speech, next toddlers produce those sounds they babbled. Babbling is dominated by stops, nasals, and glides, with a few of fricatives and affricatives and no liquids. Children take a few years to learn to articulate correctly the phonemes, with better performance on vowels than consonants.
  • Babbling (6-15 months) By imitation, repetition, and practice, children learn to approximate their pronunciation of sound sequences to that of adults.
  • Learning to produce phonemes (1-2 years) Children simplify complex syllable structures by dropping the final consonant in CVC: boot -> /bu/, ball -> /bɔ/, one consonant in a cluster: drum -> /dʌm, an unstressed syllable: ba’nana /nɑnɑ/, gi’raffe -> /rɑf/, the final syllable while repeating the initial consonant/vowel syllable: water /wɑwɑ/ 
  • Learning to produce sound sequences (1-2 years)  Children also substitute sounds – an easy, consonant for a difficult one. (For example: stops for fricatives, that for /dæt/,  zglides for liquids, little ->/wɪto/ {Children may mispronounce sounds that they can correctly hear and identify.
  • Sensitivity to phonotactics (3-4 years)