How Languages are Learned | fourth edition | Patsy M.

Lightbown and Nina Spada

Supplementary Activity 1.1: Milestones of vocal/linguistic

development
Below is an alphabetical list of descriptors that characterize some of the things
children are able to do with language at different ages. In the Table below, match the
descriptors with the age ranges. Note that there are 18 descriptors and 12 age ranges,
so you will want to enter more than one descriptor on some lines.
• Babbles repetitive consonant-vowel strings (for example, ba ba ba)
• Babbles with sentence intonation (for example, ba BA ba ba!)
• Begins to use grammatical morphemes and function words
• Combines words to make ‘telegraphic’ sentences
• Cries only because of discomfort or hunger
• Discriminates among similar language sounds (for example, pa and ba)
• Has a vocabulary of about 50 words
• Has a vocabulary of several thousand words
• Knows ‘cake the eat’ is silly but doesn’t know why
• Learns to use different ‘voices’ with different interlocutors
• Learns to use different language registers for different social/academic
situations
• Makes cooing sounds
• Makes some consonant-vowel sounds
• Produces ‘first word’
• Shows literacy-based metalinguistic awareness
• Starts to ask lots of ‘why’ questions
• Takes into account what listener knows (for example, on the telephone)
• Understands a few words

How Languages are Learned | fourth edition | © Oxford University Press

Age Description of language development
Birth to 1 month

1 to 3 months

3–6 months

6–9 months

9–12 months

12–18 months

18–24 months

24–36 months

3–4 years

4–6 years

6–8 years

8–10 years

How Languages are Learned | fourth edition | © Oxford University Press