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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.
Example: The baby is imitating his mother. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Joint Attention
Simultaneous engagement of parent and infant in mental focus on object of attention.
Example: The mother and baby are playing with blocks together. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: True Word
Inn 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. -
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 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. -
Form (Phonology)
Milestone: Phonetically Consistent Forms
Word like productions that children consistently use meaningfully but aren't adult like.
Example: A child saying "ba ba" to refer to their 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: A toddler says, "Give me that!" -
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. -
Use (Pragmatics)
Milestone: Use of informative, heuristic, and imaginitive 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. (Imaginative) -
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. -
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. -
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. -
Content (Semantics)
Milestone: Overgeneralization
Child understands words 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. -
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: 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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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. -
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. -
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." -
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." -
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."