Early Language and Communication

Babies and young children learn best through play and during daily activities. There are many ways you can encourage language and communication development in your child every day.

Play is important in encouraging the skills necessary for communication and language development. See our page here on the importance of play for your child's learning, self-expression, and communication. Observe your child’s focus of attention, follow their lead in play, get face-to-face with them in play, and make comments on what they are showing interest in.

Communication with your child may involve words, body language, gestures, sounds, facial expression, and eye contact. Attention, listening, understanding, and motivation are essential skills that make a child a successful communicator.

When communicating with your child, joint attention is important. Joint attention involves two people having a shared focus on the something that encourages an activity or a reaction. This may be an object, sound, event or person. Joint attention happens when the adult directs the child’s attention to the object by using verbal cues i.e. sounds and words and/or using non-verbal cues such as eye-gazing, pointing, showing. Joint attention skills support speech, language and communication development.

Language is a part of communication and includes both understanding and using words and sentences. There are two ways to process and develop language: Analytical Language Development and Gestalt Language Development.

  • Analytical Language Processors (“Word babies”) learn language in a sequential order i.e. they learn single words first, then they combine two words before moving on to short phrases and sentences.
  • Children who are Gestalt Language Processors (“intonation babies”) typically hear the melody of language and learn language in whole chunks. This often starts with Echolalia. Echolalia is when children repeat what another person has said. Echolalia is an essential part of language development for Gestalt Language Processors (GLP).

Videos

The ‘Learning to Talk’ series is a playlist of 20 short videos for helping all adults to support children’s early communication development. The ‘Learning to Talk’ series is designed by HSE Speech and Language Therapists in Partnership with ABC Startright, Limerick.

The first video is below - you can access the full playlist via the video link below or by clicking here. 

Further information

Below are some suggested resources for you to understand more about early language and communication: