Pre-linguistic Skills and Early Language

Pre-linguistic skills are known as the skills children need before they begin to talk. These skills are the foundations for communication. While the main goal for families is usually to increase a child’s verbal communication, developing non-verbal skills is also crucial to support a child’s early communication and their growth towards intentional verbal language. This includes engagement and joint attention, play skills, motor imitation and verbal imitation skills. There are many things that parents and carers can do at home to promote pre-linguistic skills.

Joint Attention

Engaging with people is an important skill in early language. A key indicator of this skill is joint attention (JA). This involves the ability of a child to gain, maintain, and shift attention between people and objects in the environment. This can often be seen in the early stages of development through eye contact or gestures. Early JA skills may be either initiated by the child (e.g. reaching out to an adult to be picked up, pointing at objects) or responding to their communication partners (e.g. parent points to a plane, says “look” and the child turns to look). Engagement and JA form the foundation of any interaction, including play and conversations.

Play

Play skills are also one of the building blocks to meaningful and intentional communication. Early play skills include the ability to take turns, engage with others, use toys functionally and symbolically and to share them. Play skills involve the combination of other early language skills such as joint attention and engagement and responding to other people appropriately. Engaging in play at or just above the child’s current skills and modelling the language and interaction involved in these situations may help to support them develop their skills. It is important to select interest-based activities as this will be when a child is most motivated. A child may start off by preferring to play independently, start noticing others playing around them, playing beside others and then finally playing with others.

Imitation (Motor)

Motor imitation refers to a child’s ability to copy both gross motor (large) movements, and fine motor (small) skills. Motor skills are important in developing the actions and movements for functions like walking and jumping, but are also important in developing a child’s use of gesture to communicate. At the early language stage, copying gestures and actions are easier than copying the words and sounds. Incorporating gestures (e.g. key word sign) may assist children in communicating important information (e.g. requesting) before they are verbally able. Communicating in this way may also reduce potential frustration from not being understood. A useful strategy to encouragement motor imitation is to imitate the actions of a child and see how they respond. This can be adapted to then changing the child’s original action and seeing if they will imitate this again. Songs that are paired with actions can also facilitate motor imitation skills in a natural environment.

Imitation (Verbal)

Verbal imitation forms a significant proportion of early vocalisations and the development of early language vocabulary. Children may imitate carers frequently from an early age, including sounds, actions and expressions. Building a functional vocabulary is important for enabling children to express themselves, ask for help or communicate their needs. As with the other early language skills, play contexts are a great environment for building verbal imitation skills. An early example may include encouraging imitation of symbolic sounds during play (e.g. animal noises). Another helpful tip is to frequently model sounds and add in pauses for to give the child a chance to imitate.