This page is all about 6 year old speech and language skills. Keep in mind that these milestones are based on research about typically-developing children but this information is not meant to diagnose a speech-language delay or disorder. There is a wide range of “normal” and even if your child is slightly delayed in a few of these areas, it doesn’t necessarily mean he or she has a speech or language delay. Please contact a speech-language pathologist for a screening if you are concerned about your child’s speech and language skills. All norms are taken from the Linguisystems Guide to Communication Milestones which sites the specific resources and research articles used to find each milestone.
Speech Sound Development
By this age, your child should be able to consistently make the following sounds correctly:
-/p/, /b/, /m/, /h/, /n/, /w/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /d/, /f/, “y”, /t/, “ng”, /r/, /l/
Your child’s speech should be understood by a stranger 90%-100% of the time.
Grammatical Markers
Your child should be correctly using most of the following grammatical markers:
- Pronouns:
– I, me, you, he, she, him, her, we, us, they, them
How to teach the pronouns “he” and “she”
- Possessive Pronouns:
– My, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, our, ours, their, theirs - Other pronouns like:
– myself, yourself, herself, himself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves - “-ing” on the end of verbs
How to Teach Present Progressive “-ing”
- Plural -s (The apples)
- Possessive -s (Mommy‘s ball)
- Past tense verbs (jumped, ran, etc.)
- Regular third person singular (he jumps, she runs)
- Articles (the ball, a banana)
How to Teach Articles “the” and “a”
- The conjunction “and”
How to Teach the Conjunction “And”
- Helping verbs such as “to be”, “to do”, and “to have”, including contractions (such as “that‘s my ball”, “I’ll do that”, and “I have two”)
Your child should also be producing sentences with an average length of 4.5 words/morphemes or more.
How to Increase Sentence Length
Pragmatic Skills
Your child should be interacting with other people in most of the following ways:
- Uses threats and promises
- Asks for the meanings of words
- Likes to complete projects
- Makes purchases at store (with adult supervision)
- Asks questions for information
Asking Questions Resource Page
- Chooses own friends
- Takes more care in communicating with unfamiliar people
- Engages in cooperative play, such as making group decisions, assigning roles, and playing fairly
- Announces topic shifts
Literacy/Book Skills
Your child should be using books in most of the following ways:
- Recognizes letters and letter-sound matches
- Understands that print is read left to right and top to bottom
- Retells simple stories
- Begins to write stories with some readable parts with assistance
- Tries to spell words when writing
- Understands that spoken words are made up of sounds
- Recognizes some words by sight
- Identifies and writes uppercase and lowercase letters
- “Reads” a few picture books from memory
- Prints own first and last name
- Has mastered phonological awareness and pre-reading skills:
The Ultimate Guide to Phonological Awareness and Pre-Reading Skills
Concept Development
Your child should have an understanding of most of the following concepts:
- Understands comparative and superlative adjectives, such as “big”, “bigger”, and “biggest”
- Understands time concepts yesterday, today, tomorrow, first, then, next, days of the week, last week, next week
- Understands different, nearest, through, thin, whole
- Identifies positional concepts first, middle, last
- Understands opposite concepts, such as big/little, over/under
- Understands left/right
- Understands number concepts up to 20
- Answers “How are things different/same?”
- Uses adjectives for describing
- Uses comparative adjectives such as loud, louder
- Uses yesterday and tomorrow
- Uses adverb concepts of backward and forward
- Uses prepositions through, nearest, corner, middle
- Names ordinal numbers, such as first, second, third
Vocabulary Development
Your child should have a vocabulary of about 2,600-7,000 words. We don’t recommend you try to count all of them, this should just give you a rough estimate!
Questions
Your child should be able to use questions in most of the following ways:
- Answers a variety of questions, including “yes/no”, “what”, “who”, “where”, “why”, “how”, “when”, and “how many” (as long as there are only a few things)
- Asks “what”, “where”, “when”, “how”, “whose” and one-word “why” questions
- Asks “is” questions (like “what is this?” and “is she crying?”)
Listening Skills
Your child should be doing most of the following listening skills:
- Repeats sentences up to nine words in length
- Follows three-step directions
How to Teach Following Directions
- Responds correctly to more types of sentences but still may be confused at times by more complex sentences
More Information
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