Often parents think about learning to talk in the stages of crying, babbling and then words. However, there are many steps to learning to use speech and language functionally. Below I’ve listed important skills that a child must develop before being able communicate in a functional way.
- Joint Attention: This is your child’s ability to understand that he or she and at least one other person can pay attention to the same object.
Signs of Joint attention: Your child is able to follow eye gazing, pointing, or other gestures from another person (a communication partner) which leads to both paying attention to the same object.
- Shared Enjoyment: This is your child’s ability to share an event or feeling with another person.
Signs of Shared Enjoyment: Your child looks at you or tells you to look at what’s happening. For example, you and your child are throwing balls into a hoop. Your child gets the ball in and looks at you with a smile to confirm you also saw their achievement.
Intent – baby is pointing to request an adult to look (Hemera, 2013)
- Intent: This is your child’s ability to purposefully use different forms of communication (verbal or non-verbal) to send their messages to other people.
Signs of Intent: Your child uses verbal (e.g. saying “look”, “watch”, “come here”, etc.) or non-verbal cues (e.g. pointing, gestures, etc.) to communicate clear messages to others about their wants and needs.
- Persistence: This is your child’s ability to continue attempting to communicate with someone else when their message has not been received yet. This shows that your child is aware of whether or not their message is reaching their communication partners.
Signs of Persistence: For example, your child is calling out to you. If you don’t turn around and acknowledge they called you, your child attempts to gain your attention by poking you and repeats what they were trying to say until they know you received their message.
Social Referencing – baby is checking whether its okay to climb (Coleman, 2016).
- Social Referencing: This is your child’s ability to use cues and messages from the people around them to help guide how to act appropriately in the current situation. Signs of Social Referencing: For example, your child looks to you to see if it is ok to open the door. Your child should be aware of any cues you are giving off (such as a scared facial expression or shaking your head).
You can start to look at what pre-linguistic skills your child is displaying and which ones you can work on together. If you would more advice in this area, feel free to speak to one of our speech pathologists.
Written by Joanne Tran, Speech Pathologist.
