How children learn their expressive language (speech)

How children learn their expressive speech and language

Before your child can produce words and speech, they must develop their social and attention skills. Then, they must develop their understanding skills (receptive skills). In this hub, I will just explain to you briefly about the social-attention skills first, later, when I got my free time, I will explain about the understanding skills J .

Social-attention skills.

These skills are also known as pre-verbal skills. If they don't give any attention to you, or their attention is poor, it's hard for them to focus on what are you trying to say or teach to them. Children with poor attention commonly known as ADD or attention deficit disorder. Note that the attention that we are discussing is about the child's attention to other people surrounding them. Some children can focus well during play with things, but when it comes playing or interact with people, they seems restless and try to avoid social interaction even as simple as giving their ‘eyes' to you (poor eye contact skill).

The most basic of attention skill is visual tracking. Babies, at least at 3 months must have this skill to focus at moving toys. While their lying down, try to move toys slowly from side to side in front of them. Notice that they will follow the movements with their eyes and most of the time, they move their head also.

Another basic skill in social and attention is eye contact that starts to develop around 6 to 12 months old. They must look into your eyes when you call their names. The response that you should expect from them is absolutely a spontaneous response, which means, when you call his/her name once or twice, they will at least look into your eyes even at glance to response. If you call his/ her name more than that, it means their attention at that time is low. Maybe at that moment, he/ she is busy playing toys or their channel attention is not well develop yet. This situation occurred especially to children roughly below 2 years old when they just have a single channel attention. When they focus on something, they'll just ignore other stimulations (visual, sounds, tactile) around him/ her. The rational for them to master this skill is because, in a conversation, eye contact is very important factor. Just imagine when you talk to somebody but he/ she never looks into your eyes even once. How do you feel?

Turn taking skill. A child will develop a sense of socializing by doing the same activity in taking turn. This skill will start to develop around 12 months. For example, throwing and catching ball. A child has to know the direction to throw a ball (which is to his/ her partner) and then, wait patiently to receive the ball back. And he/ she will repeat again and again until they get bored or tired. Actually, turn taking skill is also one of the basic requirements in a conversation (other than the eye contact). It takes in place when while you are talking, your partner is listening. Then, when it's your partner's turn to talk, then it's your turn to listen. Imagine if both of you breaks the social rules (turn taking) by talking at the same time.

Imitate action. It is divided to two categories; 1. Imitate gross motor action (9 to 12 months) and 2. Imitate fine motor action (18 months). The gross motor actions are like clapping hands, raise arms or legs etc. Fine motor actions are like pull out tongue, move tongue side to side, pucker lips, puff cheeks etc. A child has to give more attention to imitate the fine motor movements. If they cannot imitate actions (movements) then surely it is hard for them to imitate sounds (like animal sounds, vehicle sounds) or even speech sounds.

Joint attention (12 months). This is a skill when you ask them to look at something by pointing at that thing; they will response by looking at it. If their attention is poor, they will look at somewhere else or just ignore you. This is a skill where you and your child looking at something together. For example, while you and your child walking in a park and suddenly you saw a flock of birds flying then you asks your child to look at it. This skill is important, when you want to describe a picture to your child or when a teacher is teaching something based on a whiteboard, the child can focus and listen to what you or the teacher is saying based on what they see.

As a conclusion, children will learn the basic social rules to adapt in this world. Pre-verbal skills are very crucial for them to acquire speech because from these very basic skills, they will develop their understanding skills. And later on, they'll learn to understand the usage of each vocabulary and then use them as tools to fulfill their needs (expressive language).