Children's Communication Skills

From Birth to Five Years

Belinda Buckley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135260484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Habilidades de escritura y presentación

Based on a huge body of research in child language and communication development, Children's Communication Skills uses a clear format to set out the key stages of communication development in babies and young children. Its aim is to increase awareness in professionals working with children of what constitutes human communication and what communication skills to expect at any given stage.

Illustrated throughout with real-life examples, this informative text addresses:

• normal development of verbal and non-verbal communication skills
• the importance of play in developing these skills
• developmental communication problems
• bilingualism, cognition and early literacy development
• working with parents of children with communication difficulties.

Features designed to make the book an easy source of reference include chapter summaries, age-specific skills tables, sections on warning signs that further help may be needed, and a glossary of key terms. It will be of great use to a wide range of professionals in training or working in health, education and social care.

The First Year

1

○ Developments in hearing, attention, cognition and understanding.

○ Reasons why babies communicate.

○ How babies’ communication skills develop; links between nonverbal and verbal communication skills.

○ Vocal development, babbling and using early words.

○ Summary of key points; tables of communication skills usually achieved in the first year; tables of possible warning signs to help identify children with communication difficulties.

Hearing, Attention and Listening

‘Wired up’ to Hear Voices

Babies are highly sensitive and attuned to the sounds of the human voice. Many babies quiet to the sound of a familiar, friendly voice from the earliest days after birth (Ashmead and Lipsitt 1977). The voice that they are most used to hearing is that of their mother. At twenty weeks, an embryo’s inner ear (the part of the ear that senses and directs sounds on to the brain) is fully developed, which means that by the time a full-term baby is born, she has been hearing for about five months (Northern and Downs 1991). Babies only a few days old have shown preference for hearing their mother’s voice over other voices and they are able to discriminate their mother’s voice from other female voices (De Casper and Fifer 1980). Studies have also shown that newborn babies respond to and prefer the human voice over other sounds (Friedlander 1970). Other studies have shown that newborns respond to sound in different ways, depending on the duration, loudness and pitch of the sound. Newborn infants are predisposed, it would appear, to listen to the human voice and also to begin the mammoth task of separating out the various speech sounds from the streams of singing and speaking that envelope them from their earliest moments.

Development of Hearing, Attention and Listening over the first Year

The First Six Months: Developing Selectivity

At birth, babies show a startle response to sudden changes in their environment. They may blink their eyes open wide or wake up from sleeping in response to loud noises, bright lights and sudden movement (Northern and Downs 1991). Their ability to control their attention is extremely limited in the first few weeks, enabling them to look at toys or faces for a very short space of time. Over the next few weeks, babies appear to listen to people speaking to them by looking and smiling at them (Bzoch and League 1991). They begin to show interest in speakers’ mouths and by the end of the third month may start to look in the direction in which another person is looking. They quiet when they hear their parent’s voice, even if the parent is not in view, and by 4 months babies will deliberately turn their heads towards the source of the voice, looking about for the speaker (Bzoch and League 1991). By 6 months the baby is still very distractible, but she is starting to become more selective towards sound. She will soon turn her head immediately to her parent’s voice or to quieter sounds at the side of her head providing she is not preoccupied with a toy. She may show that she recognizes frequently heard names and words that are meaningful to her like ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and ‘bye-bye’ and may show early understanding of ‘no’ by stopping or hesitating in an activity (Bzoch and League 1991). The baby at this stage is only able to attend to input from one sensory channel at a time; when exploring a toy with her hands or watching an exciting mobile her lack of responsiveness to sound, for example, may make her appear deaf. The baby is getting better at being able to look in the same direction in which another person is looking and is beginning to share joint attention with another person towards an object or activity. Sharing joint attention is an extremely important skill to develop as it underpins later language and discourse skills.

The Second Six Months: Listening to Speech

Over the next five months the baby will come to recognize words in speech-action games, and start to attend to music and singing (Bzoch and League 1991). She will engage in sound-making activities such as banging spoons, pots and toys together. By now she can hold objects in either hand and bring her hands together (Sheridan 1997). She enjoys playing with squeaky toys and starts to respond to representational sounds such as animal and machine noises (moo, baabaa, vroom, brrrrrooom). By 8 months she may appear to listen to conversations between other people and to recognize the names of some everyday objects, and now regularly stops an activity when she hears ‘no’ (Bzoch and League 1991). Her attention span remains very limited, as is her ability to attend to information from more than one sense at a time. By this time she is able to follow an adult’s pointing finger and to follow another person’s gaze without difficulty, both of which contribute significantly to the amount of shared focus held between baby and adult (Carpenter et al. 1998). This mutual focus both helps the baby to understand the world around her and begin to see it from another person’s perspective, and informs adults of what the baby is interested in. This last point is extremely important in enabling the baby to build up links between words and their meanings, which she is increasingly able to do in the forthcoming months. Around 10 months she is usually able to listen to other people talking and not be distracted by other sounds, and will often give a toy or some other object to a parent when asked to (Bzoch and League 1991). She can attend to an activity or object of her own choosing for a limited time. She is beginning to attend to visual and auditory information simultaneously for short periods of time. She may respond to music by moving her body or hand in approximate time to the rhythm. By the time she is a year old she will show intense attention and response to speech over prolonged periods of time. She is less distractible and is better able to look and listen at the same time. The ability to locate accurately sounds to the side, above and below ear level continues to develop and may not be fully developed until she is about 16 months old (Northern and Downs 1991).

Towards early Verbal Understanding

Cognitive Developments

Developing Concepts of Objects

Babies need to know that objects like teddies, cups and blankets exist even when they are not in sight in order to give them names and talk about them when they are not there. The concept of object permanence starts developing around 5 months and may not be fully developed until the second year (Bloom 1993). Children’s ability to represent objects, people and events mentally is closely linked to language development and other ways of symbolic representation of things in the world, especially play. The slightly older child can think about her favourite food, ask for it when it is not there and talk about it in conversation; later on she can turn a piece of cardboard or a wooden brick into a piece of cake in her play. Symbolic understanding is a very important part of learning to use language effectively. Once babies come to realize that things and people still exist even if they can’t be seen and that actions can be remembered and anticipated (‘Where did mummy put my teddy? I bet I’ll find him in here!’) they will have cause to use language to express their comments and discoveries to people they are interested in. Before they can start to use language effectively, however, babies need to understand language, and in order to do that they need to have plenty of experience of the things in the world that are represented by language (Bloom and Lahey 1978).

Objects and Categories

Information gained through experiences about the perceptual and functional properties of objects enables the baby to start forming categories and thus to start linking labels not only to objects but also to their various features. Formation of conceptual categories, which are necessary in order for meaningful language to emerge (Bloom 1993) are built on the baby’s concepts of objects. For example, the baby comes to understand that big and little spoons, plastic, metal and wooden spoons, pretend and real-life spoons can all be used for the same purpose – feeding. The baby needs to develop such categorical and conceptual information before she can start talking about big spoons or little spoons, or to differentiate spoons from forks, for example. Groupings of categories are very broad initially and become increasingly specified as the baby acquires more knowledge about things in the world around her (Mandler et al. 1991).

Example 1.1 Using Objects in early Play

At 10 months, Rowan started to put a brush briefly to her hair, to lift up and aim the television and video controls towards the television, to ‘talk’ into the telephone and to ‘eat’ from a spoon while she was at play. In these ways she demonstrated understanding of an object’s use or meaning by using it, if only with a brief gesture, outside the normal context.

Figure 1.1 Ten-month-old Rowan uses a telephone in play

Early Situational Understanding

Between 6 and 12 months, babies’ verbal understanding starts to develop. Babies gradually start to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Examples and case studies
• Tables
• Key skills
• Warning signs
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Human Communication
• 1. The First Year
• 2. The Second Year
• 3. The Third Year
• 4. The Fourth and Fifth Years
• 5. Learning more than One Language in Early Childhood
• 6. Problems Developing Speech, Language and Communication
• 7. Working with Parents of Children with Communication Difficulties
• Useful addresses
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index