I am looking for statistics at what age children begin to speak a little

Hello.

"By 14 months most children have said their first word (bye-bye, mama,
baba, blankie). Between the ages of approximately 12 and 24 months,
the toddler delights his parents by labeling and describing his
environment (nana, juice, doggie, up, more, gone, push), revealing the
growing vocabulary he has been working hard to acquire. This
single-word vocabulary gives rise to word combinations by 18 to 24
months (more juice, doggie gone) and phrases (me all finish, dat my
car) a little later. By age three, with seemingly little conscious
effort or instruction, most children will be beginning to speak in
multi-word phrases or even complete sentences...
This is how speech and language skills develop for ninety percent of
young children."

source:
A Parent?s Guide to Children?s Speech
HTML cache by Google:
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:HQO_dtojrEAJ:www.caslpa.ca/PDF/a%2520parent%2520guide%2520to%2520children%27s%2520speech.pdf+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Or PDF version:
http://www.caslpa.ca/PDF/a%20parent%20guide%20to%20children's%20speech.pdf
(The document is in PDF format, so the Adobe Acrobat Reader is
required. If you don't have that, visit:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html )



"By six months of age, an infant usually babbles or produces
repetitive syllables such as "ba, ba, ba" or "da, da, da." Babbling
soon turns into a type of nonsense speech (jargon) that often has the
tone and cadence of human speech but does not contain real words. By
the end of their first year, most children have mastered the ability
to say a few simple words...
By eighteen months of age, most children can say eight to ten words.
By age two, most are putting words together in crude sentences such as
"more milk." During this period, children rapidly learn that words
symbolize or represent objects, actions, and thoughts. At this age
they also engage in representational or pretend play. At ages three,
four, and five, a child's vocabulary rapidly increases, and he or she
begins to master the rules of language."
source:
Speech and Language: Developmental Milestones, from nih.gov:
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/speechandlanguage.asp



Also see:

"Can Two Year Olds Talk?" from harvard.edu:
http://pcs.mgh.harvard.edu/heal_lang_art1.htm

"Speech and language development from birth to age five," from
partnershipforlearning.org:
http://www.partnershipforlearning.org/article.asp?ArticleID=1592

"Speech & language development (from 12 to 24 months)"
http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/factsheets/misc/speech_development_1_2/

"Communication and Your 1-2 Year Old," from the American Medical Association
http://www.medem.com/MedLB/article_detaillb.cfm?article_ID=ZZZ7P5QP1AC&sub_cat=108

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search strategy:
"first words," months, "most children"

I hope this helps.

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Clarification of Answer by juggler-ga on 13 Dec 2003 23:47 PST

I notice some problems with the URLs for the Parent?s Guide to
Children?s Speech mentioned at the beginning of my answer:
Use this one for Google's HTML cache:
http://snipurl.com/3epu
Or this one for the PDF:
http://snipurl.com/3epv

thanks