North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Language Development and Communication (LDC)

Subdomain: Learning to Communicate

Goal: Children speak audibly and express thoughts, and feelings, and ideas clearly.

Skill Progression: Articulation/ sound production

Age: 4-6 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 4-6 Months.

Vocalizes “ma” or “mu”

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe the infant during face-to-face interaction with an adult and during daily routines.

Elicitation Strategy

The adult talks to the child, but also models blowing saliva bubbles, raspberries, and making lip sounds with ‘b,’ ‘m,’ ‘p’ combined with a vowel.

Behavior Observed

The infant combines vowels and consonants in different ways.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Encourage vocal play with the infant, using slow movements and interesting effects, such as bubble blowing and making raspberries. Modify volume, pitch and rate of sound production depending on the response of the infant. If production is too rapid, the infant will lose interest.

 North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2015

©2015 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.