See that tiny baby, who makes unintelligible gurgling sounds. Would you believe that this same little person, within just three years will be chattering away as comfortably as you and me? Actually the seeds of language acquisition are sown in the womb. Talking starts with listening and experts believe that unborn babies are tuned in to the world. There's now scientific evidence that new borns recognize their mother's voice within the first three weeks.

Between four to six weeks your baby will start to "talk" to you, gazing at your face with coos, chortles, chuckles. After three months these noises begin to change into babble, with sounds like "baba" and "gaga" and – yippee - a dialogue is bom. You talk. He talks and waits for your reply. This is called turn-taking, a basic concept that underlies all future communication, even among adults. As the months pass, the sounds emerge as words. It's amazing how quickly this happens. Babies learn to discriminate between different sound structures. The sounds made by 3-month - old babies from, say, English speaking, French speaking and Spanish speaking households are the same. But by nine months the sound structures are completely different. At 12 months your baby may be saying a few words - usually dada, mama, baba or the names of his favourite toys - although you may be the only person who recognizes them.

By his first birthday your baby has intonations of speech. The babble rises and falls, slows and speeds up, enabling him to practise speech sounds and rhythms. Even before the first words appear you'll notice huge leaps in your child's understanding. He'll understand "no", respond to his name and follow simple commands such as "give it to me." All children follow a standard pattern of development. However there are large variations in the age at which he does things. Some children are very early in language; others remain wordless for a long time and then start jabbering incessantly in whole sentences.

Talking early doesn't mean that your child is a brighter spark than his peers! My own son broke out in an imperious "Mummy, come here, I want you!" at the age of two plus, after I feared that all was not well with his vocal chords. This self same son is now a Radiologist. Your baby has to have the desire to communicate verbally. New words come slowly at first. It's estimated that in the early stages a child needs to have heard a word between five and six hundred times before he says it. So to begin with he will only learn a couple of new words a month. After which the progress will soar. A child who knows just 20 or 30 words at 18 months may have a vocabulary of several hundred words at two.

After single words come phrases and you may need to interpret what's being said. So "Samba’s dolly" may mean "that's Samba’s dolly" or "give Samma the dolly."

The next stage is adding more words to make sentences - usually some time in the second year - and starting to use plurals and different tenses. Don't correct bad grammar.

Respond in normal speech and he'll eventually pick it up. By the age of three, most children talk non-stop, and ask questions endlessly. This can be wearying, but do your best to answer because he really wants to know.

Although children have an innate ability to learn language, we are a vital part of that process. Research shows that babies who are talked to, learn to speak and make complex sounds more quickly. Talk to your child, listen to him and treat him like a little person. Even before he can start to speak, engage him in conversation. All young children need to have adults listening and talking to them to help them understand language, which is how a kid can learn to be trilingual with different talk for different folks - say French with a maid, Spanish with a grandmother and English with the parents. Bilingual children have the same vocal range as monolingual children, it has been found.

Some children have trouble with one sound or the other - say "foo" for "who", "sow" for "show", "S" for "F", "Th" for "S" - which can correct them with time. Occasionally it could signify a physical problem that may persist forever. Sometimes the child clings to the mispronunciations in one word long after learning to make the same sound correctly in another word. This could be an attention seeking device or to please parents who think that saying "dooad" instead of "doing" is "cute". Read and speak one-to-one. Give plenty of opportunities to reply. Correct mispronunciation gently, without showing anger. Interaction with other children will help.

After five, stuttering and clumsy speech, which is ridiculed by other children, needs a speech therapist's intervention. It is estimated that 10 to 15% of 2-year-olds and 4 to 7.5% of 3-year-olds show some sort of language delay. In about half the children this is the outcome of poor hearing which can result in problems with understanding or being understood. We respond to what we hear, so a child hard of hearing cannot develop normal speech without help.

The main hearing test is at eight months. However babies may pass this test and then develop hearing loss at a later date, often as a result of glue ear. This can clear up without treatment or with an ENT's help using grommets or plastic inserts to drain out excess fluid after the child is three.

Other causes of Late Speech: ADHD, Cleft Lip and Palate, Autism. Learning Disabilities is also one of the important causes. Consult a speech therapist if you are concerned.

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