Final answer:
Babies begin to develop language skills before birth, recognizing their mother's voice and differentiating languages. They start producing meaningful words around 12 months and begin combining words into simple sentences at about 18 months. By age two, many toddlers have a vocabulary of up to 50 words and comprehend simple commands, indicating rapid language development.
Step-by-step explanation:
Understanding Language Acquisition in Babies
Babies begin to pick up on language cues and start understanding the meaning of words and the formation of sentences right from before birth, showing a preference for their mother's voice and the ability to discern different languages. This innate capacity for language development continues to evolve as babies grow. Around six months of age, babies may start vocal play and produce sounds like 'mama' or 'dada', suggesting the onset of associative learning between sounds and meaning. The first word for meaning generally appears around the age of 12 months.
As infants progress to the one-word stage, these individual words carry broader meanings, signalling the start of deliberate communication. It is then around 18 months when children begin to combine words to form simple sentences and can actively employ language to determine and signify their desires and observations. The ability to follow simple commands and understand many more words than they can express emerges at this stage, laying the groundwork for more complex language use and understanding.
Gesture usage even predates and predicts subsequent spoken language development, indicating that non-verbal communication is an integral part of language acquisition. By the time they are two years old, toddlers can use up to 50 words and comprehend at least a couple hundred more, displaying the rapid progress in language development. They can also understand simple verbal commands and are starting to show self-recognition and signs of independent behavior.