Category — 1.3 Communication: Articulation

Communication Development: Articulation¹

Articulation refers to how a child pronounces the different sounds when they speak their language. Children develop the ability to pronounce certain sounds before others, simply because some sounds are more difficult to pronounce than others.

Babies’ first sounds are usually vowel sounds. This is called “cooing.” A baby will say, for example, aaaaa, uuuuuuuuuuu….

After that, comes the production of simple consonant sounds. Most children by the time they are 18 to 24 months old, can produce the following consonant sounds: p (papa), b (baba), d (dada), and the m (mama) and n (nana) sounds. After that, come the k (kaka), g (gaga, gugu), t (tata). The “r”, “l” and “s” sounds are a bit more difficult to pronounce and some children do not master the production of these consonant sounds until they are five or six years old.

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