About Learning to Communicate
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Important skills for communication development
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Early communication skills
Three skills which are essential to communication development in the first 12 months are eye contact, joint attention and turn-taking.
Eye contact
You will notice that from a very early age your baby is attracted to your eyes.
When your baby makes eye contact with you, it makes you feel that he wants to talk to you. This is because eye contact signals to us that someone is ‘ready’ to communicate with us.
Eye contact is also used to direct someone’s attention.
Your baby will first learn to communicate by using his eye contact to indicate to you what he wants. Later he will begin to combine actions and vocalisations with his eye contact in order to communicate with you.
Joint attention
Joint attention is attending to something at the same time as someone else.
In order to have an effective conversation, we need to talk about the same topic.
Your baby will learn to communicate through his joint activities with you.
Through play, your baby will first learn to attend to objects or toys that you place in front of him.
He will then begin to use his hands to direct his own attention to things and will begin to follow where you point.
By 12 months he will have learnt how to direct your attention by pointing and will even begin to look where you look.
Turn-taking
In order to have a conversation we need to be able to take turns.
Turn-taking begins very early in your baby’s development.
Initially your baby will use general body movements as his turn.
As your baby develops, his turns will become more like yours.
When you talk to him, he will tend to use vocalisations more and when you do actions, he will also tend to respond with actions.
Games such as pat-a-cake are very good for encouraging turn-taking.
