By Rachel Singleton
One of the first questions I ask my early intervention clients is:
“When do you think language starts developing in children?”.
This is my favourite question because the answers vary from, “when my child starts making noises” to “when my child is able to understand what I am saying”.
As humans we often base our actions towards something on the reaction it is able to give us. We see this every day when we speak to people; we change our tone, accent and choice of words relative to the person or people we are addressing. If we take this example and look further at my opening question, we can expect that parents will interact with their child based on what they think the child’s abilities are at certain stages of development. That is why this is such an important question. When we do not fully understand how and when language starts developing we can put limitations on our children and we are at risk of not giving them enough exposure to language to help them develop in all areas of communication.
Now, let me let you in on a game changer.
Studies have shown that babies start to learn language in the womb. Yes, that’s right, before your baby is even born they would have already been exposed to a number of language learning opportunities while in utero. These studies show that since your voice is amplified by your body, it, along with sounds, can be heard by your baby while in utero. Your baby will start making sense of the sounds they hear and by hearing speech patterns they can discriminate between their mother’s home language and foreign languages from a few hours after they are born.
I hope that this is blowing your mind because I expect it to completely change the way you interact with your miracle from the moment they are conceived. If the only thing you take from what I tell you today is that your baby has a very sophisticated brain and what you put in to that very sophisticated brain determines what you will get out of it, I will be satisfied that I have done my job. We cannot assume a limitation for our children; we have to expose them to as much interaction, music and sound from the moment of conception and then just never stop.
How well the brain develops in the first few years of a baby’s life is dependent on many factors such as genes, nutrition, exposure to infection and toxins and most importantly the child’s experiences with other people in the world. That’s you. Your child’s experiences with you can hugely impact their development.
Now that I have hopefully changed your life with the science behind language development and how important it is to interact with your baby from the word “GO”, let us look a little closer at...
The communication milestones we can expect through the first 18 months of your child’s life.
From 0 to 6 months your baby will start to coo and make gurgling sounds, they will express different types of cries for different needs , they will smile when spoken to, recognize voices, turn toward sounds and use “p”, “b” and “m” when babbling. I like to remind my parents to name their child’s teddies or bottle using these sounds, like “booboo” or “moomoo”. This will allow your child successful communication in their first 6 months and to unintentionally start connecting names to items.
7 to 12 months is when your baby starts to understand you more. They learn to understand “no”, follow simple instructions like, “come” and “give me” and understand and respond to their own name. Babies in this stage of development also start to use more sounds when babbling, start to imitate adult speech sounds, use gesture and vocalization to gain attention and express their wants and their vocabulary actually starts to develop allowing them to say between 1 and 3 words.
When children start to understand the words you are saying it is important to intentionally use appropriate words. Keeping your utterances short but valuable allows children to attend to all the important words you are saying. When we talk to our children in lengthy sentences at this age, they only pick up on a few words in those sentences and we can never be sure if they have picked up on the most important ones. Using shorter phrases like “eat up”, “yum yum”, “mmm”, “so good” and “all done” rather than “come let’s eat all this yummy food on your plate so that it is all finished” allows us to use intentional words that we know they will be receptive to without limiting the amount we are saying.
After your baby’s first birthday to 18 months is when their expressive language should start to grow. They should start to imitate one-word phrases, repeat words that they overhear in your conversations or around the house, put together sounds as though they are talking but make no sense, make verbal requests for items they want like “more” or “blankie” and they should have a vocabulary of between 3 and 20 words (mostly all of these words will be nouns to name items). They also start to follow new simple commands and identify some of their body parts.
At this stage you should be narrating your life while you are with your baby. You should be naming everything you are doing with them and around them again using one or two words at a time and labelling everything you touch and every action you make. It is important to use different types of words; naming words, action words, location words, descriptive words etc. so that your child’s vocabulary can expand and vary even though they will more likely only be using naming words.
All this being said, I think it is important to remember that we all have strengths and weaknesses and babies do too. Some children develop slightly slower and that’s ok, as long as we are always making sure that they are being exposed to the right language at the right time.
Rachel Singleton is a Johannesburg based Speech & Language Therapist, who owns her own practice called Small Talk Therapy.
Comments