Part I: Prelinguistic Skills in Early Language Development

Prelinguistic… what the heck does that mean?

Prelinguistic skills are early developmental markers that occur prior to the use of true words.  When studying in graduate school, I remembered “prelinguistic” as “pre-language.”

Parents frequently come into speech therapy asking, “When will my child talk?” Essentially, they’re asking, “When will my child use adult words and sentences to communicate wants and needs?”

This is a great question… if only I could wave my magical wand and make all children talk!  The truth is, children have to develop these “pre-language” skills before we start to notice true words (or word approximations that closely resemble the adult-version of a word.) What are these pre-language skills that speech language pathologists attempt to stimulate, engage and build upon? Why, I’m glad you asked… For the next few days, I will be blogging about some of the things I look for when evaluating a young child…

Today, I will discuss communicative intent.. This is where I usually start in the evaluation of a young child’s communication abilities…

• Is the child intentionally communicating his/her wants and needs?!
• A big surprise to most parents is the fact that babies don’t actually become intentional in their communication until they are about 10 months old.  Sorry mom and dad, but when your child started saying, “dadada” at 6 months, they weren’t calling for dad… Just babbling
• Does the child have an intentional point to request/label things?
• This occurs at about 10 months, too. Is a baby pointing or reaching for a desirable object? This is another sign of communicative intent.
• Does a child bring a parent to a desired object?
• Pulling, grunting and pushing a parent to a desired object is showing communicative intent… That baby is communicating that he/she wants something – and wants it NOW!

If a child is not showing communicative intent (ie., pointing, babbling and pointing, pulling a parents to a desired object, etc.), this is a great place to start treatment. I will go into more specific treatment strategies in a later post, but I generally start with:

• The use of a simple “more” sign to request
• Forming a child’s hand into an intentional point prior to giving him/her a desired object
• Using simple, short words to label all things the child wants or needs

So, to initially address a parent’s question of, “When will my child talk?”, I first look at their child’s communicative intent and how I can provide that specific child and his/her family with strategies to enable their little blessing to communicate in their daily living environment.

Happy communicating,

-the.baby.babbler.