Posts tagged receptive language
Preschool Milestones
 

We expect three to four year olds to achieve many speech, language, and communication milestones. Here is a condensed list of what preschoolers should be demonstrating mastery in the following areas: receptive language, expressive language, articulation, social communication, literacy & phonological awareness. 

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Receptive Language

  • Follows three to four-step directions (e.g., put your dinosaur under the small table)

  • Listens to two to seven-line story and answers concrete (who, what, where) and abstract (when, why, how) questions

  • Understands pronouns (e.g., he, she, they)

  • Understands spatial concepts (e.g., in, on, in front of, behind)

Expressive Language

  • Has a vocabulary of about 1500 words

  • Uses three to six words sentences

  • Uses regular plural -s (e.g., papers), present progressive -ing (e.g., walking), third person singular (e.g., drinks), regular past tense (e.g., walked), irregular past tense (e.g., drove), and possessive’s (e.g., mommy’s) 

  • Produces antonyms and synonyms and completes concrete convergent and divergent naming tasks

Articulation

  • The following sounds should produced accurately: p, b, m, n, t, d, h, k, g, w, ng, f, y, l, j, ch, s, z, v, sh

  • The following phonological processes should no longer be heard: weak syllable deletion (e.g., banana→ nana), fronting (e.g., go→do), final consonant deletion (e.g., dad→da), assimilation (e.g., jam→mam), reduplication (e.g., bottle→baba), prevocalic devoicing (e.g., sun→zun), cluster reduction (e.g., clean→kean), stopping (e.g., soup→toup), final consonant devoicing (e.g., mad→mat), and deaffrication (e.g., chip→sip)

  • Produces a variety of syllable shapes: consonant-vowel (e.g., ma), vowel-consonant (e.g., it), consonant-vowel-consonant (e.g, bat), etc. 

  • Produces speech that is 90-100% intelligible

Social Communication 

  • Engages in parallel and symbolic play

  • Takes turns in the conversation

  • Conveys emotions in pretend play

  • Understands simple conversation rules (e.g., turn-taking, topic maintenance, eye contact)

Literacy & Phonological Awareness

  • Talks about characters in a book

  • Retells simple stories

  • Begins to understand the concept of syllables, segments words into syllables, and blends syllables into words

  • Participates in rhyming games, isolates sounds in words (e.g., beginning, middle, and end of the word)