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Know

Infants and toddlers are able and ready communicators. They communicate through gestures, sounds, facial expressions, movements, and language. This next section will highlight language and communication milestones for infants and toddlers. It will be followed by a section that discusses these milestones by introducing three aspects of language and communication that caregivers can think about: receptive language, expressive language, and conversation skills.

Milestones

Infants’ and toddlers’ abilities to communicate grows as they interact and communicate with others. In fact, the sounds, tones, and patterns of speech that an infant hears early on sets the stage for learning a specific language. They begin to understand words, and express themselves in their language as they learn rules of conversation.

Think of how exciting it is to hear young infants making new sounds each day, hearing an infant say new words or listening to toddlers express themselves by stringing words together! The chart below highlights infant and toddler communication skills as they grow. Keep in mind that individual differences exist when it comes to the specific age at which infants and toddlers meet these milestones and that each infant and toddler is unique. A brief version of this information aimed at parents can be found in an easy-to-use checklist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As you may have already learned in the Cognitive and Physical courses, milestones provide a guide for when to expect certain skills or behaviors to emerge. Think of milestones as guidelines to help you understand and identify typical patterns of growth and development, or to help you know when and what to look for as young children mature. As an infant and toddler caregiver, you can use this information, what you learn from families and your own knowledge in the interactions, experiences and environments you create for infants and toddlers.

Learning to communicate is a unique process and specific to each infant, toddler and family. Many aspects of a child’s environment may contribute to challenges with communication development. A family may wonder about their young child’s communication and language development and feel uncertain about what they are observing, as well as what to expect. As an infant and toddler caregiver, you have an opportunity to learn first from a family and consider offering additional developmental information, including possible warning signs. The Kids Included Together can be a valuable resource for you (), as well as the developmental milestones and act early information located on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, . The table below also highlights possible warning signs for infants' and toddlers' language and communication development:

How Infants and Toddlers Communicate

As you study the chart above, you may notice that some milestones are associated with infants’ and toddlers’ ability to listen to and understand language (receptive communication). Other milestones are associated with infants’ and toddlers’ ability to express themselves using sounds, movements, gestures, facial expressions, and words (expressive communication), and some are associated with infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge and ability to engage in communication exchanges with peers or adults (social engagement). Let’s take a look at how these aspects of communication unfold as part of the remarkable development of young children during their first three years.

Receptive communication refers to an infant’s or toddler’s ability to listen to and understand language. They begin to understand language as part of their nurturing relationships with responsive, trusting adults and are able to make sense of gestures, facial expressions, tone, and words well before they are able to verbally express themselves.

Expressive communication is the ability of infants and toddlers to express themselves through sounds, gestures, facial expressions and words. A beginning point for expressive communication is the infant’s cry. Cooing is another form of early communication and can begin as early as one month. By six months, you can hear new sounds like “ma,” “ba,” and “da.” By 24 months, you may hear toddlers using two- and three-word sentences, such as “me go,” or “more drink, please.”

Social engagement involves the understanding and use of communication rules such as listening, taking turns and appropriate ways to use sounds and facial expressions. Conversations involve both understanding (receptive communication) and expressing (expressive communication). Infants and toddlers learn the ways to use sounds, gestures, facial expressions and words of their family’s language(s) when adults interact, talk, read and sing with them.

�Թ���ing Communication, Language, and Literacy

Effective communication, language and literacy skills are important to young children’s self-expression, their development of social relationships, and to their learning. The foundation for these skills begins during the earliest months and years after birth. When families and caregivers engage in and sustain interactions based on an infant’s or toddler’s development and interests, they help strengthen their role as a partner in communication. In fact, research demonstrates that these skills depend greatly on language experiences during infancy and toddlerhood. Children who hear fewer words are engaged in less conversation before age 3 with their caregivers, and have dramatically smaller vocabularies than children who have richer early language experiences (Hart & Risley, 1995). Communication and language development happen best in the context of consistent, caring and responsive relationships.

Your role as an infant and toddler caregiver offers opportunities to support these skills throughout the day. You can use your knowledge about communication and language development alongside your observations of the infants and toddlers in your care. Together, this information can create opportunities to engage infants and toddlers in communication according to their interest. For example, during mealtime with infants and toddlers, you can maintain eye contact, smile, repeat and add meaning to the infant’s sounds, or follow a toddler’s eyes as they look at the green vegetables on their plate and then say, “You’re looking at your green peas. What else is green?” Or, talk about who is sitting next to an infant or toddler. “Who is going to sit beside you today at lunch, Tommy? Oh, look, Cassandra is going to sit beside you.”

Your role as an infant and toddler caregiver also offers an opportunity to create an environment that provides what infants and toddlers need to become good communicators early in life. A communication-rich environment is characterized by intentional and frequent use of such strategies as:

• Learning about communication and language development in infants and toddlers
• Talking with and learning from families, as well as observing and identifying the developmental stage of individual infants and toddlers, and offering experiences and activities that can best support their development and learning
• Adding words and ideas to best describe infants’ and toddlers’ understanding of experiences
• Being responsive to infants’ and toddlers’ communication attempts and building on what they are expressing
• Talking with infants and toddlers about the events of the day
• Following infants’ and toddlers’ leads, cues, and preferences
• Including new words in conversations
• Embedding songs, rhymes and finger plays into daily routines and experiences
• Describing infants’ and toddlers’ actions, interests, events, or feelings
• Reading to infants and toddlers frequently and providing opportunities for them to engage with books and printed materials
• Incorporating alternative ways and systems of communication, based on individual needs (e.g., using pictures or visual cues to foster communication)
• Serve and return interactions

Serve and return interactions are another example of opportunities for caregivers to engage with infants and toddlers while fostering brain development and communication growth. Serve and return works like a game of tennis or volleyball between child and caregiver, but instead of a ball, various forms of communication are passed back and forth between the two. The child “serves” by reaching out for interaction—with eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, babbling, or touch. A responsive caregiver will “return the serve” by speaking back, playing peekaboo, or sharing a toy or a laugh. (Serve and Return 2020)

These back-and-forth exchanges increase infants’ and toddlers’ language experiences, vocabulary and opportunities for communication. Engaging in serve and return interactions are essential to the brain development of infants and toddlers and help children learn skills that are foundational for later development.

Watch the following video from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University that demonstrates serve and return exchanges:

After viewing the video, think about the activities in your day that provide opportunities for serve and return interactions.

See

Do

Understanding developmental milestones is an important aspect of working with infants and toddlers. Learning about and understanding how infants and toddlers communicate will help you know how to support them in developing effective communication and language skills and what kinds of learning experiences to plan for in your early care and learning setting. Each infant and toddler is different. Therefore, it will be important to customize experiences and activities to meet their unique needs. Consider the following for each infant and toddler in your care: