Communication – how children experience speech development
Babies and toddlers are born with all the skills they need to interact with their environment. These include spoken language, facial expressions, gestures and body language. This means that they can communicate with other people right from birth. This is also important because communicating urgent needs ensures survival, whether it is individual sounds that express a desire for physical contact, or the baby needing to cry and scream to register its discomfort. Normally, parents intuitively know what their baby is trying to communicate and can understand the sounds and facial expressions of their little ones in the same way they understand spoken language.
Little by little, toddlers learn to speak. A child's language development takes a very long time. Although the speech centre in the brain is already in place at birth and the organs and muscles required to speak are formed, each child learns its own language skills at its own speed. Therefore, the age when a child begins to speak also varies considerably. In the same way, all children are different in the speed with which they can expand their vocabulary and form sentences.
Communication
When do children start speaking?
Language development is fun
Playfully encouraging communication development
Fostering the development of communication with dolls
Role play is a wonderful way to get into conversation with each other. Particularly when they are playing with dolls, children process things they have experienced in their everyday lives and often adopt the role of a parent. They often repeat conversations or sometimes remain completely silent, but even then, they are telling a story in their head and in doing so are expanding their linguistic abilities.
Read also how HABA dolls can help children explore their daily lives in a playful way.