List of Skills by Age
1-2 Months
2-4 Months
4-6 Months
6-8 Months
8-10 Months
10-12 Months
12-15 Months
15-18 Months
Produces holophrastic speech (i.e., one word may mean many things)
18-21 Months
Omits grammatical markers, such as “a” or “the”
Produces two-word utterances; produces telegraphic speech, using only key words (e.g., “Car go”)
21-24 Months
24-27 Months
Produces regular possessives (e.g., mommy’s) emerge
Produces and between nouns (e.g., “I want juice and cookies.”)
27-30 Months
Produces have and do as auxiliary verbs (“Do you like apples?”)
Produces infinitive verb phrases with hafta, wanna, gonna. (e.g., “I wanna go”)
30-33 Months
Starts a sentence with and, because or so (e.g., “And I runned.”)
Uses to as a preposition to indicate direction toward (“giving it to the baby”)
Produces can, will, be as auxiliary verbs + negative forms (e.g., can’t, won’t, don’t)
33-36 Months
Produces the following morphemes: Uncontractible copula (“Who’s here? I am.”)
Produces infinitive phrase “have got to..."
36-42 Months
42-48 Months
48-54 Months
Produces the following morphemes: Contractible auxiliary verbs (“they’re coming”)
54-60 Months
Produces indefinite negatives, including nothing, nobody, and no one
 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/.