How does language development take place in babies?

Most parents find it amazing how their little babies whose only mode of communication was non-verbal and crying have now become active talkers some 14 months later. Most scientists are of the opinion that babies have an innate ability to learn language and are already preconditioned to pick out certain sound combinations from their noisy environment and develop their own language skills without our help. Another amazing aspect to their language development is that nearly all babies build their linguistic skills in the same order using the same 'building blocks' and usually around the same time, further supporting the theory that learning language comes naturally to babies. Having said that, an important contributory factor to your baby developing language is what your baby is exposed to most of the time. That is to say a baby in a Japanese speaking environment learns Japanese and not English or French or Arabic. Another important finding is the amount of language stimulation your baby receives is directly going to affect her language growth. Interestingly summarized is this observation that though a six month old child may respond to words e.g. respond to her name when called, we cannot assume that she understands the meaning of those words or that she knows that's her name – you can call her virtually by any name and she will respond. An average 12 month old child will understand about ten words and a few simple instructions. And by age 3, children will understand about 70 percent of the language they will use in ordinary conversation for the rest of their lives.