Speech and language skills

  • Language is used to maintain social bonds (just talking)
  • Persuasive and argumentative skills reach near-adult levels
  • Average vocabulary size of high school graduate in 10,000 words
  • Sentence length and complexity in written language is greater than in spoken
  • Rate of modal auxiliary use increases
  • Full adult range of syntactic constructions reached
  • Knowledge of morphophonological rules reaches adult levels