AN INFANT CAN COMMUNICATE EVEN BEFORE TALKING BEGINS: A LANGUAGE-RICH ENVIRONMENT IN THE EARLY YEARS HELPS PROMOTE COMMUNICATION AND EXPRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN LATER YEARS

Before children say their first words, they begin to communicate through eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, cries and sounds. Researchers have provided evidence that even before infants can speak, caregivers and infants show turn-taking patterns. This vocal interaction in early infancy has been referred to as “

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In protoconversations, the adult may say something and the infant responds by making eye contact, cooing, smiling, showing lip and tongue movements or waving arms, which then invites a response from the adult. These caregiver-child interactions help build infants’ abilities for further language acquisition. A study showed that maternal interaction with infants as young as two months occurred in various modalities, including gaze and vocalisation.

These “conversation-like” interactions go back and forth between the adult and the infant for several turns. Studies have shown that the timings of these sequences are like that of adult verbal conversations. A study on infants aged between 8 and 21 weeks based on the analysis of 176 samples of naturalistic face-to-face interactions clearly showed that infants can initiate these conversations. Turn-taking in preverbal interaction adapts to infants’ changing motives for communicating and learning. Additionally, this also paves the road for learning the crucial socio-cognitive skills that precede and enable language use.

The early non-cry vocalisations of infants are also salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30-50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants' prelinguistic non-cry vocalisations facilitates the development of phonology (ability to discern word sounds) and speech.

In this experiment, the infants engaged in a two-minute still-face interaction with an unfamiliar adult. When the adult assumed a still face, infants showed a burst of vocalisation to try to get the face to respond (extinction bursts). This pattern of infant vocalisations suggests that five-month-olds have learned the social efficacy of their vocalisations on caregivers' behaviour. Furthermore, the magnitude of five-month infants' extinction bursts predicted their language comprehension at 13 months.

Evidence shows that caregivers' speech to babbling infants provides crucial, real-time guidance to the development of their prelinguistic vocalisations.

In an experiment with 60 nine-and-a-half-month-old infants, mothers of the infants were instructed to provide models of vocal production timed to be either contingent or noncontingent on their infants' babbling. Infants given contingent (immediate response to babbling) feedback rapidly restructured their babbling, incorporating phonological patterns from caregivers' speech. However, infants given noncontingent (non-immediate) feedback did not. Thus, preverbal infants learned new vocal forms by discovering phonological (sound structure) patterns in their mothers' contingent speech and then generalising from these patterns to create more sounds to communicate.

Some studies have shown that during the transition between the babbling period and first words (i.e. before the infant can produce two joined words, one after the other), the gestural system and system of speech are already closely linked. Researchers found that young children produce the most gestures when they start saying their first words.

Children also use pointing to direct attention and express interest in what they see. Pointing is a key gesture affecting the development of joint-attention and the acquisition of language. Gesturing helps children learn because it externalises an existing representation from memory. Hence, accepting a child’s gestures and verbally expanding may promote communication.

After the protoconversation stage, children gradually begin to progress to generate increasingly understandable sounds or verbal communication. Eventually, they demonstrate their expressive language abilities by asking questions and responding to them and repeating of sounds or rhymes. Children typically acquire their first 50 words between the ages of 1 and 2.

A researcher notes: “The 24-month-old child with a productive vocabulary between 50 and 600 words will easily quadruple or quintuple her vocabulary in the next year, and then add between 3000 and 4000 words per year to her productive vocabulary until she graduates from high school.”

For expressive skills and communication to develop, a language-rich environment that builds receptive skills must be established first.

One key component for creating this kind of environment is adult interaction. The amount and quality of adult-child conversation is correlated with children’s subsequent language and literacy development.

14, 15

14. National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel, a scientific synthesis of early literacy development and implications for intervention. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.

15. Strickland, D. S., & Shanahan, T. (2004). Laying the groundwork for literacy. Educational Leadership, 61(6), 74–77.

Researchers carried out a meta-synthesis review of 103 studies from peer reviewed journals to examined children’s exposure to language nutrition during their first 3 years. While initial assessments of the children occurred before the child’s third birthday, outcome measures were obtained during an age range of 6 months to 8 years. The research found that providing “language nutrition”, which incorporates caregiver talk, social interaction and shared reading experiences to which young children are exposed impacted how the infants below 3 acquired language. The research found that the quantity as well as quality of words spoken to a child has a significant impact on a child’s receptive as well as expressive vocabulary.