by Ms. Royce

Created on: June 23, 2008   Last Updated: November 17, 2010

In writing this short piece, it is my desire to educate and inform the parent or caregiver of the various stages of language development among infants and children. If you're a new parent and need some insight to a babies cries, then reading this article may be of assistance.

From birth, a child has a multitude of ways to communicate. Through such nonverbal means as facial expressions, eye contact and body gestures, babies only hours old begin to "teach" their parents and caregivers when and how they want to be held, fed, and played with. As early as the late 1800s, Charles Darwin proposed that most emotional expressions, such as smiles, frowns, and looks of disgust, are universal and innate. Children who are born blind and deaf exhibit the same facial expressions for emotions as sighted and hearing children.

In addition to nonverbal communication, children also communicate verbally. The prelinguistic stage begins with a newborn baby's reflexive cry. Within a short time, crying becomes more purposeful. At least three distinctive patterns of crying have been identified. They are hunger, anger and pain. Some parents and child care texts suggest that each of these cries can be easily identified and responded to by the primary caregivers. However, most parents find that they must learn, through a process of trial and error, what each cry means and what actions will satisfy their child.

At about 2 to 3 months, babies begin cooing, producing vowel-like sound. Then around 4 6 months, they start babbling, adding consonants to their vowells such as ("bahbahbah" and "dahdahdah".) Some parents mark babbling as the beginning of language and consider their child's vocalizations as "words". They do this despite the fact that the child typically does not associate a "word" with a specific object or person, and all children babble in the same fashion.

The true linguistic stage begins toward the end of the first year of life. The babbling begins to sound more like the language of the child's home and the child seems to understand that sound is related to meaning. At the beginning of the linguistic stage, the child is generally limited to a single-utterance vocabulary such as "mama", "go," "juice," or "up." Children manage to get a lot of mileage our of these singular utterances. "Mama" can be used to mean, "I want you to come get me," "I'm hurt," and "I don't like this stranger." However, their expressive ability more than doubles once they begin to join words into short phrases

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