Children’s development from new-born infant to verbally competent child is so rapid that it never fails to impress us as adults. Once we begin to appreciate just how complex language is, it seems to us that a child with no prior experience of any language has an almost impossible task ahead. Communication is both verbal and non-verbal, and the intended meaning of both forms is affected by the context they occur in. With respect to verbal communication, infants have to realise that the sounds we make with our mouths carry meaning, that it is constructed from discrete units (words), that words can only be combined in certain ways, and that there are many, many words to learn - some of which have abstract meanings; while others have more than one possible meaning.

How do babies make sense of communication?
The inborn abilities and environmental context of the developing child are both of critical importance if children are to be successful in this journey to linguistic competence. It is important to recognise that children are not passive recipients of information: from the outset they are seeking to make sense of their linguistic environment, exploiting whatever mental and physical abilities they have at that point in their development.

When children are born, they appear to have an innate preference for looking at human faces and attending to human voices over and above other types of stimuli. Such preferences serve to orientate the new-born to their immediate interpersonal and communicative environment. New-born children also show a tendency to imitate the facial expressions they see, a behaviour that the adults around them often interpret as intentional communicative acts on the part of the baby. It seems likely that the positive attention that children receive when they copy a smile or gesture eventually lead them to make these gestures deliberately to the adults around them. However, it is difficult for psychologists to know when this shift from imitation to intentional gesture actually occurs: conservative estimates suggest this is most likely to occur by the time the child is three months old, although other researchers believe that children only a few weeks old show signs of wanting to communicate with others through gesture.

With respect to children’s vocalisations, babies produce a wide variety of noises, ranging from the all-too-familiar crying through to gurgles that are made during periods of contentment. In the first two months of life these noises include a variety of sounds, some of which sound language-like to the adult ear, and others which sound more foreign, like clicks and trills. These gurgles are eventually replaced by ‘cooing’ sounds, which commonly persist until the children are 20 weeks old. These gurgles and coos are not believed to be attempts to communicate verbally, although cooing is seen as a form of vocal playing. This eventually gives way to ‘babbling’, which is when babies begin to make sounds that are syllabic and consist of familiar consonant and vowel sounds. This stage of language development is the subject of intense debate, with some researchers noting the similarity between babbling sounds and children’s imperfect pronunciations of first words, while others see it as essentially random action and unrelated to early speech.

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