Language development

Interaction

Begins at birth. Babies have a drive to interact with their environment, and especially with the people around them. Everything a child sees/ hears/ feels and does helps them to make sense of the world. 

Babies want and love to be around other people.  

Early communication skills are non-verbal. Even very tiny babies will take turns in interactions with smiles, eye contact and movement.  

A child needs to become motivated to communicate. They need to learn that their actions or noises can make something change. If they have lots of experience of successful interactions, they will become more and more motivated to keep interacting.  

Attention and listening 

Develops alongside other skills. A child has to be able to listen and pay attention. This helps them to match the language they hear to what they are doing.  

Young children have very short attention spans. They can only pay attention to one thing at a time. 

Young children can only focus on one thing at a time. Very young children focused on an activity will need to stop what they are doing to focus on something else.  

By school age children should be able to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. School age children need to be able to listen to something even if they are doing something else. 

Background noise affects how easy it is for a child to pay attention. It’s even more difficult for tricky tasks. It’s similar for us adults. Have you ever said “turn that music off, I can’t hear myself think?”  

Play 

This is how children learn about the world around them.  

Children need to have lots of different experiences to help them learn the language they need for thinking, learning and communicating. These experiences should include things like:  

• People play – games like peekaboo or rolling a ball back and forth together 

• Cause and effect play – things like shaking a rattle to make a noise or pushing a button to make a toy pop up 

• Pretend play – making an imaginary cup of tea for someone or pretending to fly to the moon in a cardboard box 

• Construction – building towers from blocks or making shapes from play-doh 

• Physical play – climbing, balancing, running, jumping 

• Songs and stories  

• Messy play – slime/ mud/ paint/ water/ sand 

Pretend play is particularly important. In pretend play, children learn symbolic understanding and thinking. Symbolic understanding is essential for language development. For example, by pretending to make a cup of tea, a child learns that a toy cup can stand for a real cup. This then translates to the word ‘cup’ standing for all different kinds of cup.  

Turn taking is an important skill for having successful and balanced conversations. The first turn taking experiences a child has are in play. This could be when rolling a ball back and forth or taking turns to run a toy car down a ramp.  

Understanding 

It’s easy to over-estimate how much language a child understands. Usually when we communicate with children, we’re not just using words. We also use facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures or situational cues. Imagine that you’re getting ready to go out. You might be saying “let’s go to the park” but you’re probably also getting your wee one’s bag, coat and shoes ready. You might have your coat on and an excited look on your face. The situation and routines will also help your child to understand what you’re saying.  

Children have to understand a word before they can use it properly. If you’ve ever been in a foreign country, you were probably able to pick out certain frequently used words. You probably understood more than you could ever say. It's the same for children when they learn language.  

Talking 

Talking means how a child uses words and sentences. Before talking, a child will express themself through non-verbal communication. This includes:  

• Cooing 

• Babbling 

• Facial expressions 

• Pointing 

• Gestures 

First words usually develop around the age of 1. These might be words like ‘mama’ ‘dada’ ‘milk’.  

Between 1 and 2, children usually start to join words together. This might be phrases like ‘mama eat’ ‘dada car’.  

Children need between 50 and 100 words before they start to put words together.  

Children need a mixture of different words before they can make a sentence. They need:  

• Nouns: mama/ dog/ car/ milk/ cup 

• Verbs: eat/ jump/ go/ drink 

• Adjectives: big/ small/ red/ noisy 

Vocabulary size is an important indicator of later success in learning.  

Children learn words faster if the people around them chat to them, read to them and sing with them.  

Speech Sounds (pronunciation) 

This is the most noticeable part of communication – the sounds children use. However, speech sounds can’t develop properly without the earlier stages of language development.  

Speech sounds develop in predictable stages.  

Most 3 – 4 year olds can be understood when they speak, but it can take until the age of 7 before a child has a fully developed speech sound system.  

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All of the different stages of language development depend on each other. Each stage continues to develop as the child moves on to the next level. This makes the language tower strong, meaning that language is developing properly.  

If a child’s interaction skills or their attention skills aren’t properly developed, their language development won’t be robust. It’s as if one of the lower blocks in their language tower isn’t big or strong enough. That makes the tower wobbly.  

If a child isn’t talking as you might expect, it might be that an earlier stage hasn’t developed completely yet. Focus on the lower stages to help get the child ready for talking.