A person in a prelingual state is someone who has not yet acquired language. This most commonly describes infants under 12 to 18 months old, but it also applies to children born deaf or who lost their hearing before learning to speak, and to older individuals with severe developmental delays that prevent language from emerging on a typical timeline.
Infants Before Their First Words
Every baby starts life in a prelingual state. From birth through roughly the first year, infants communicate entirely through non-word vocalizations, cries, facial expressions, and gestures rather than structured language. This phase follows a predictable sequence: newborns coo and make pleasure sounds in the first three months, shift to speech-like babbling with consonant sounds (p, b, m) between four and six months, and then produce longer strings of repeated syllables like “babababa” or “tata upup” from about seven months onward.
Even without words, prelingual infants are active communicators. By 12 to 15 months, most babies use two distinct types of pointing. Imperative pointing is when a child points at something to request it, like reaching toward a cup of juice. Declarative pointing is more socially complex: the child points at something interesting, like a dog walking by, to share that experience with a caregiver. These gestures are building blocks for language. Infants at the prelingual stage produce roughly one intentional communicative act per minute during interactions, compared to about two per minute once they begin using single words and five per minute once they combine words into phrases.
Children With Prelingual Deafness
A child who is born deaf or loses hearing before acquiring language is described as prelingually deaf. According to CDC screening data from 2022, about 1.7 out of every 1,000 newborns are identified with hearing loss, though the actual number is likely somewhat higher because not every case gets reported to state tracking programs.
Many children with prelingual deafness aren’t diagnosed until around age 2, when parents and pediatricians notice that speech development hasn’t progressed as expected. This delay matters because the brain’s window for learning the sound system of a language begins closing between 10 and 12 months of age. English-learning infants, for instance, can distinguish speech sounds from Hindi that aren’t used in English, but only until about 10 to 12 months, after which the brain starts pruning its sensitivity to unused sound categories. For babies born deaf, the window for acquiring spoken phonology through a cochlear implant may close even earlier, around 12 to 14 months.
The first three years of life are considered the critical period for speech and language development. Children who receive cochlear implants between 12 and 16 months of age score, on average, at the same level as hearing children on language tests. Those implanted before 18 to 24 months consistently outperform those implanted later. Even children implanted as late as 36 months can reach age-appropriate vocabulary levels, but the strongest and most durable spoken language outcomes come from intervention within the 12 to 36 month window.
Children With Developmental Differences
Some children remain in a prelingual state longer than expected due to autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, or other developmental conditions. In these cases, the prelingual period can extend well beyond the typical 12 to 18 month range.
Research comparing toddlers with autism to those with other developmental delays has identified several distinguishing patterns. Children on the autism spectrum tend to produce fewer early gestures, particularly those involving shared attention, like pointing to show a parent something interesting. They may use objects in play without difficulty but lag behind in referencing and sharing experiences with others. How often a child with autism vocalizes turns out to be a strong predictor of both their receptive and expressive language abilities, a relationship that doesn’t hold in the same way for children with other types of developmental delay. In contrast, joint attention (the ability to follow someone’s gaze or share focus on an object) is a stronger language predictor for children with other developmental conditions than for children with autism.
These differences matter because they shape what kind of early support is most helpful. A child who vocalizes frequently but doesn’t share attention needs different intervention than one who engages socially but rarely makes sounds.
How Communication Is Assessed
Clinicians use several structured tools to measure where a child falls on the prelingual communication spectrum. The Communication Complexity Scale rates the sophistication of an infant’s non-word communication during play, covering a developmental range from 1 to 18 months. For children with hearing loss, the Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale uses a structured parent interview to evaluate how a child responds to everyday sounds in their environment. Expressive vocabulary can be tested by asking children to name items across categories like animals, foods, clothing, and transportation, while receptive language is often measured by having children match spoken words to pictures.
These assessments help identify not just whether a child is prelingual, but how close they are to transitioning into language use, and whether their prelingual communication is developing in typical or atypical patterns.
The Brain’s Role in the Prelingual Window
The prelingual state isn’t just the absence of language. It’s a biologically distinct period during which the brain is uniquely primed to absorb linguistic input. Phonological learning, the process of mastering the basic sound units of a language, begins before birth as fetuses respond to the rhythm and melody of their mother’s speech. This system starts narrowing by 10 to 12 months, locking in sensitivity to the sounds the infant hears most often and reducing sensitivity to unfamiliar ones.
Complete, early acquisition of a sound system appears to be foundational for broader language proficiency. Children who miss this window, whether due to undetected hearing loss, limited language exposure, or neurological differences, face a steeper path to fluent language. The brain retains some flexibility beyond infancy, but the efficiency of language learning drops significantly after the prelingual critical period closes.