The work before the words…

It is a well-known fact that children learn and develop at an astonishing rate during their earliest years. Speech and language development, in particular, is a process that undergoes changes on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis in children under 5 years old. While there tends to be a considerable amount of focus on a child's verbal expression, what is less commonly highlighted is the effect that pre-language skills have on early language development before a child ever speaks his or her first word. 

Pre-language skills are those skills that develop prior to verbal expression and lay the foundation for future speech and language success. Four pre-language skills that are crucial to the emergence of the first word are joint attention, imitating gestures, imitating non-speech sounds, and imitating speech sounds. We will spend a considerable amount of time breaking down each of these concepts over the next few articles. For now, we will briefly introduce each skill as a jumping off point for what is to come in our journey towards developing foundational language skills.

Joint attention is an important early social skill that helps children learn how to interact with others. It involves sharing attention with another person, usually a parent or caregiver, in order to communicate and connect with them.

Gesturing involves using your hands and body to communicate nonverbally and can be used to convey a variety of different needs. Young children often use gestures to supplement their speech, and research has shown that gesture production precedes speech production by about 6 months on average. 

Imitating non-speech sounds and speech sounds are the final two pieces that round out the foundational puzzle of early language development. Non-speech sounds are all the sounds and noises that babies and toddlers make before they learn how to talk, whereas speech sounds are all the consonant-vowel combinations used to create intelligible words. 

Pre-language skills are incredibly important for early communication and language development. The more tools and understanding that you as the parent or caregiver have regarding fostering these skills in the home, the better your child’s chances of developing strong language abilities will be for the future.