What exactly counts as communication?
There are two main forms of communication — verbal and non-verbal. Most adults do both at the same time; when we express ourselves verbally, we can’t help giving off non-verbal cues, with gestures, eye contact, body language and facial expressions.
If a person sends out a message where the verbal and the non-verbal communication clash, we usually trust the non-verbal message. A classic example is a person taking exams who shakily claims not to be nervous.
How your child communicates
• The first "language"
Newborns have an innate need to interact, and they develop a wide variety of non-verbal ways of communicating. In order to develop this non-verbal “language,” your child needs to do quite a lot of developing: She needs to learn to control the movements of her arms, hands and fingers in order to point, for instance.
Educator and researcher Burton L. White, author of the classic The First Three Years of Life, says that babies start to understand words when they are about 7 to 8 months old. A 1-year-old will understand between five and ten words, in addition to simple messages like “sit” and “bye-bye.”
Even if they don’t yet understand words, children do very clearly react to the pitch and tone of your voice (excitement, irritation, aggression).
• Learning deliberate communication
Children develop their ability to communicate intentionally by interacting with adults. A gesture as simple as waving an arm or pointing can start off as a spontaneous movement but may come to have very specific, deliberate meaning.
Here’s an example: You build a tower of blocks in front of your baby. Baby knocks it over — probably unintentionally at first. She waves her arms happily. You take this to mean that she wants to repeat the game, so you rebuild the tower. Baby makes the blocks fall over, intentionally this time, and waves her arms to make you rebuild it again. The process repeats itself. Later, she may use the same movement in a new context — waving her arms and looking at her cup, for example, until you hand it to her.
As your child develops and matures, she starts playing with the sounds of words, babbling in a sing-song way that resembles the patterns of your speech. She comes to understand that those sounds represent objects in her world: cup or cat or shoe. And eventually she finds ways to put these words to use, because she wants to make herself understood.
Being aware of your child’s body language can help her express herself. Here’s an example from one mother: "One day we were in the park, and Peter and I saw a caterpillar on a bench. I mimicked the caterpillar’s movements by curling my index finger. A few days later we were in the park again, and Peter went over to the bench. He looked at me and curled his index finger. There was no caterpillar, but he remembered the incident from earlier the same week, and he wanted to tell me that he remembered. When I told him I remembered the caterpillar too, he was so proud he had managed to communicate this to me!"
• Suddenly speech
Most parents can’t point to the exact moment when their child “cracks the code” of verbal communication. But at some point, each child discovers that a combination of sounds describes what they see around them, or what they want. Parents and older siblings provide the data — words, sentences, song lyrics — and the child works on them.
When a child says her first words, a world of possibilities opens up. Of course, in most cases it takes a while for her to string together several words in a way that parents can easily understand. Single-word expressions can be puzzling; when your child says “woof-woof,” for example, she could mean:
o There’s a dog!
o Is that a dog?
o Look at that dog!
o What a nice dog!
o I want to touch the dog!
Even if you don’t know what exactly she means, it’s a good idea to try to interpret her utterance and give your child feedback.