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Period: to
Infancy: 0-12 months
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Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Control of Phonation (1-4 months)
This is when infants begin to produce vowel-like sounds or even combine vowel sounds with consonant sounds. This includes "cooing and gooing," raspberries, clicks, and nasalized sounds.
Example: The baby looks up at mom while blowing raspberries and making nasalized sounds. -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Reduplicated Babbling (5-10 months)
The infant begins to produce vocalizations that consist of consonant-vowel (CV) pairs.
Example: The baby looks at mom and babbles, "ma ma ma" and "da da da" repeatedly. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Intention Recognition
Babies learn to distinguish between purposeful and accidental actions.
Example: The baby watches the adult as they continue reaching for the rabbit despite the different path taken. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Imitation
The baby will begin to imitate gestures of the person in front of them, usually their mother or father.
Example: The baby watches his mother put her hand on her head and then puts his hand on his head. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Joint Attention
Simultaneous engagement of parent and infant in mental focus on object of attention.
Example: The mother holds up a block for the baby to look at it, the baby is now looking at the block with mother. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Declarative Pointing
Interaction between infant and adult. The infant points to call adult's attention to objects and/or to comment on them.
Example: The infant sees a truck driving by and points it out to get his mom's attention saying. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Gestures/Greeting
The infant will be able to use gestures and begin to greet others.
Example: The infant likes to wave "Hi" to strangers passing by. -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Jargon (9-18 months)
Babbling that consists of at least two syllables and two vowels, with different stress and intonation patterns.
Example: The boy uses jargon while playing with dinosaurs amongst himself. He babbles, "eeyah baaboo!" -
Period: to
Toddlerhood (12-36 months)
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Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Age of Mastery
The age at which toddlers are able to produce a word in adult-like manner.
Example: The toddler is able to pronounce "juice" in a clear, adult-like, manner. He used to say "juju" and now clearly says "juice." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: True Word
In which an infant uses a word with clear intention, recognizable pronunciation, and consistently.
Example: A baby uses the word "doggie" when he sees a dog. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Verbal Turn Taking
Toddler interacts in conversation by talking, waiting for a response, and then responding.
Example: A toddler talking to their dad, without interrupting, the toddler waits for dad to finish talking before responding. -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Negation
Child begins to resist and/or deny. Their MLU is about 1.31 according to Brown's stages.
Example: The toddler says "No!" when told it's bedtime. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Referential Gestures
This indicates a referent with stable meaning across different contexts.
Example: A toddler waving to say "bye" to their mother. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Use of 3-20 words
Children around almost a year and a half have at most 20 words in their lexicon.
Example: The mother noticed that her 18 month old has learned to use at least 12+ more words than they were able to just 6 months prior. -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Phonetically Consistent Forms
Word like productions that children consistently use meaningfully but aren't adult like.
Example: The little girl says, "ba ba" in reference to her bottle. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: 50 words in use, verbs and adjectives emerge.
The toddler's lexicon expands to about 50 words and the use of verbs and adjectives begin to emerge.
Example: The toddler's vocabulary has grown in the last year. The toddler says, "Give me that!" and "That's so good!" displaying their use of adjectives and verbs. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Gesture-Word Combinations
This indicates preparation for the transition from the one word to two word stage.
Example: A toddler putting their hands out and saying "Up" to show they want to be picked up. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Understands around 500 words, can express 200 of them.
The child's expressive language continues to grow, with their receptive language even more advanced.
Example: The mother talking to her toddler realizes that her daughter is beginning to pick up on a lot of words said in the home. Her toddler has become very talkative and has produced a lot of new words during conversation. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Use of informative, heuristic, and imaginative functions.
This is when toddlers begin to provide information, inquire for information, or telling stories/imaginative play.
Example: A toddler playing with toys pretends to be a doctor. She says, "I'm a doctor do you have oucheys?" (Imaginative and Heuristic) She also says "Doctors help you feel better." (Informative) -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Use of Intonation
Children begin to ask questions using the rising intonation.
Example: The toddler asks, "But mommy, why?" with rising intonation. -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Use of two-word combinations
The child begins combining words for multiword utterances.
Example: Instead of just saying "Food" to request more food, they say "More food." -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Engaged in short dialogues
The child is gaining ability to have short conversations including the changing topics and/or introducing new topics.
Example: The toddler talks to her mom about going to the park. Her mother says, "We will go to the park later," and the daughter responds with, "I'm going to swing." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Extendability
Child knows that the word labels category of object.
Example: A toddler is able to correctly label a chair, no matter what kind of chair it is or how different they may look. -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Assimilation
When children change one sound in a syllable for a feature of another sound in a syllable.
Example: A child pronouncing cake as "take." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Overgeneralization
Child has understanding of a word but may over use them for objects that may be in similar category.
Example: A toddler calls every animal they see a "doggy" even if it is a cat, rabbit, etc. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Underextension
Child may under use a word to refer to a subset of referents.
Example: A toddler may not refer to other cats as "kitty" because they aren't gray like the one she has at home. -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Present Progressive Morpheme
Child begins using morpheme "-ing" in their language.
Example: The child says, "Daddy sleeping." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Overlap
Toddlers overextend the use of a word in some instances but underextend the same word in other instances.
Example: The toddler refers to laptops and Ipads as "tablets" but not touch screen phones. -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Independent clauses emerge
The toddler begins using three element sentences.
Example: A toddler would begin to say "Baby is sleeping," instead of "Baby sleeping" -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Clarification
Toddlers begin to clarify in conversations as well as request clarification.
Example: A toddler figures out how to clarify what they are asking for when parent doesn't understand. -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Four element sentences emerge
The child begins to expand sentences with four words instead of three.
Example: The child comes home with a sticker and says "The teacher gave me a sticker!" -
Period: to
Preschool (36-60 months)
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Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Fast Mapping
The ability to acquire a general representation of a word with just a single exposure to it.
Example: At school the teacher read a picture book to preschoolers about giraffes. A few weeks later during play time the teacher asks a student to point out the alligator and he is able to correctly identify it.. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Engagement in longer discourse
Around this age children are able to keep up with a conversation of two or more turns. They are able to understand that waiting their turn to talk is more effective than talking at the same time as the other person.
Example: Two preschoolers are observed having a conversation about what kind of toys they have at home. One child says, "I have a blue train and legos." the next child responds with, "I have transformers and cars." -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Use of compound sentences with "and"
Children begin to produce compound sentences in their languages, specifically with the word "and."
Example: The child tells the preschool teacher about what she did on her snow day saying, "It was snowing and we played outside." -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Allomorphic Variation
Children learn morphemes that show consistency in pronunciation before they learn morphemes that vary in pronunciation.
Example: The preschooler has no trouble using the morpheme "-ing" in words such as "sleeping." However, he still struggles correctly pronouncing plural morphemes like "boxes" which uses the sound /IZ/ instead of /s/. -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Consistency in use
Children learn the morphemes that are used most often such as; "Mommy's shoe," ('s at the end for possessive noun) before learning morphemes that aren't consistent in how they're used.
Example: The little girl began using possessive nouns in sentences like, "Daddy's truck," but she hasn't began using past tense verbs such as "Mom baked cookies. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Understanding of Opposites
Children understand and use opposite terms, learning the physical opposites before the abstract opposites.
Example: The teacher asks a preschool girl to tell her what the opposite of big is and she responds with, "Small!" -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Word Awareness
This is when children have an understanding that sentences are made up of words and can properly segment them.
A child is given a sentence and it is read out to them, "The hat is up on top." The child is able to separate the sentence into each word. -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Single relation between morpheme and meaning
Children tend to learn the morphemes that only hold one meaning before they learn morphemes with multiple meanings.
Example: A preschooler begins to correctly use the morpheme "the" long before they can distinguish between "-s" in plural, third person, or present tense. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Primitive Narrative
Children begin to tell narratives that include a action, event, and consequence.
Example: A child shares a story about what he did on the weekend saying, "My mom was at home with me. I went outside and saw a squirrel. The squirrel was running from me and I fell down. I started crying because it hurt and mom gave me a bandaid." -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Syllable Awareness
This is the ability to hear and identify the amount of syllables in a multisyllabic word.
Example: The preschoolers are doing a syllable clapping game with their teacher. They clap twice for the word "pancake," segmenting the word into "pan" and "cake." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Development of Kinship Terms
This is when children begin to understand and use terms such as; mother, father, brother, sister. These specific terms are learned earlier than less immediate family members such as aunt and uncle.
Example: The preschooler begins to point out their baby sister at home, she says to her parents "That's my sister!" -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Use of contractions
Children begin to combine two words into one smaller word on a consistent basis.
Example: The little girl comes home from preschool with her hair down even though she went to school with a ponytail. When asked where her hair tie went she shrugs and responds, "I don't know," instead of "I do not know." -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Understanding of Indirect Requests
This is a request made with nonverbal pointing to the main subject with a verbal request.
Example: The preschooler is helping her mom set the dinner table. The mother points to the cups and says "We don't have enough cups." The preschooler immediately goes to pick up more cups. -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Verb Morphology (Auxiliary Copula)
The ability to use auxiliaries and copulas emerges in sentences. Auxiliaries are when the verb "to be" is used as a helping verb, while copulas are when the verb "to be" is used as the main verb in a sentence.
Example: The little boy began to use auxiliaries such as saying, "Bluey is nice." For halloween the boy was dressed as Bluey and used copulas by telling everyone, "I am Bluey." -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Own-name Advantage
Preschoolers learn the letters in their own name prior to other letters
Example: A child is given cards with different letters and is told to pick out the one's he knows best. He picks the letters in his name to spell out "George." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Deictic Terms
Children begin to use deictic terms which refer to the location of the speaker and listener in a particular setting. They develop the use of "here" and "this" before "that" and "there." (e.g. here, this, that, there)
Example: When the father's loud car pulled up in the driveway, the little girl yelled to her mom, "Daddy's here!" -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Phonological Processes Diminishes
Preschoolers begin to make less systematic errors in their speech.
Example: A preschooler who previously use weak-syllable deletion to say "jamas" now can say "pajamas." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Knowledge of Animacy
Children understand animacy and use it to infer meaning of new words. During the use of common nouns child select inanimate objects, and with the proper names they picked animate objects.
Example: A preschooler is shown a picture of an animate and inanimate object. When told to "Find the apple," the kid points to the inanimate apple, and when told to "Find apple," the child points to the animated apple. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Logical Functions
This is when children use a logical relation between ideas.
Example: A preschooler is in the kitchen with their little sister helping their mom bake cookies. The preschooler tells their little sister, "Don't drop the egg or you will make a mess." -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Use of WH- questions
Preschool age children begin to ask wh- questions such as; "what do-, what does- and what did," questions.
Example: The parent noticed that since their child turned four they have lots of questions such as; "What does that do?" and "What do you do at work?" -
Form (Morphology)
Milestone: Use of irregular plural form
The ability to use irregular plural form emerges (e.g. women, men, feet).
Example: The child begins to use the irregular plural form of tooth saying, "Look at my teeth." -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Initiating Conversations
Children learn to start a conversation with another person when in a situation where they must have small talk.
Example: The children sit down at the table for snack time while the teacher passes out goldfish. One child turns to the kid next to them and says "I love goldfish, I want to eat them every day!" -
Form (Syntax)
Milestone: Formation of 5-8 word sentences.
Around this time preschoolers begin to produce sentences with more words, ranging from about 5-8.
Example: The preschool teacher informed the parent that their child has gone from using 4 word sentences to 6 word sentences such as; "The dog is going potty outside." -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Narrative (without theme/main character)
Children are able to tell a story that has a sequence of events included, however no clear theme or main character is included yet.
Example: The child is telling a story about what happened at home. He says, "Dad was sleeping on the couch and mom got mad because Ben peed on the floor."