If you are a parent of a young child who uses no words or just a few words, you may be interested in what drives the process that determines your child’s choice of early words.
One process that guides what early words are used is called “selectivity.” Briefly, research has shown that children say words based on sounds they can say. This selectivity tends to exist for children up through approximately the first 50 words. In typical development it disappears around 22 months of age, on average. This process enables a child to go from pre-speech sound making to word use–it’s a word-learning device or mechanism.
So, if a child babbles the /b/ sound a lot, he is more likely to produce words that start with the /b/ sound. Similarly, if the child babbles the /d/ sound a lot–she will be more likely to try to say words that start with /d/. “Chance” is operating here–certain sounds will occur in babbling based on chance. A child will produce /b/, /m/, /d/ or some other sounds as “first sounds” and then begin to build a vocabulary from there.
For those of you reading whose children say fewer than 50 single words, listen for specific sounds your child makes and then create a list of about 10 words that start with that sound. Then choose about 5 words from your list that are practical in your child’s daily life, and present those frequently throughout the day. For example, for /m/, you might list mom, mama, mommy, more, moon, me, my, mine, move, make, mad, moo. When modeling the words you have chosen, prolong the /m/ so your child really detects it: “mmmmmore”. Never “bounce” the production of the first sound as in: “m-m-m-more”. I often hear parents trying this, and I have never found it to work for children–each burst of the sound is still too fleeting, and producing a sound by itself doesn’t help a child slide the sound into the next sound, usually a vowel sound. Hold onto the sound and stretch it out to make it last longer, and then flow right into the rest of the word: “Mmmmama.”
If your child is not very vocal at all, then be sure to make a lot of “bare” sounds in play and other interactions throughout the day. For example, when stacking up blocks, you can just say, “buh…buh…buh…” as you stack the blocks, as you touch each one as though “counting” it, as you knock each one off the tower, or as you put each one on his head-for him to tip off his head with glee!
Of course, keep regular language modeling going on as you play and interact, but provide a lot of exposure to isolated speech sounds, too, to help your child build a repertoire of sounds.
By: Mary Lou Johnson About the Author:
Mary Lou B. Johnson, M.S., CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with over 34 years experience working with children and their families at The Children’s Hospital, Denver. In her eBook, How To Help Your Child Learn to Talk Better in Everyday Activities, Mary Lou shares with readers the information, insights, and ideas that she has shared with parents in her practice. Mary Lou hopes that her eBook will enable a parent to gain new ideas and more confidence in her abilities to help her child acquire new speech-language skills. The reader can see the topics covered in the eBook by viewing the Table of Contents on the home page of the web site at
http://helpyourchildspeak.com.
