Attention, babbling!
A child’s speech is determined from the first days of his life. Not yet able to pronounce sounds and not yet understanding the meaning of words, he listens to his parents’ conversations and has a desire to respond. Parents who do not give importance to early conversations with the baby, make a big mistake.
By two months of age, babies are already trying to pronounce individual sounds, and by five months of age they begin to babble, forming syllables out of them. The baby can spend hours repeating the same combinations of sounds, “ma-ma-ma-ma”, “boo-boo-boo-boo”. After a while, parents get used to this “musical accompaniment” and stop paying attention to him. But babbling is exactly the construction material from which the child will later begin to build their first meaningful words. To in the future “construction” was successful, it is very important to develop this skill of the baby. For this purpose is ideal for the “roll call game”, when the adult repeats after the baby “babbling” words and soon hears them again from the mouth of the child. The benefits of such a simple fun is huge – it develops pronunciation, hearing, as well as the ability to imitate. With their help, after a while the baby will begin to independently “borrow” words and whole sentences from the conversations of adults.
Don’t go to extremes
Learning to understand adults – a task for a little person is no less responsible and difficult than to speak himself. Of course, he cannot do without the help of his parents. However, parents are often prevented from meeting the expectations of the infant by two extremes: taciturnity and verbosity;
Many parents are sinfully stingy in their communication with their child, because he or she doesn’t understand anything anyway. However, excessive verbosity is not better. After all, the condition of a small child, who is bombarded with verbal streams, is similar to what we would experience if we suddenly found ourselves in the center of a noisy market, where everyone is talking in Swahili.
In order for a word to be associated with a specific object, it should be emphasized with pauses and intonation. Parents should name not only objects, but also actions (“give”, “put on”, “take”), then the child will quickly learn to understand the words of instructions.
Internal logic
Up to a certain age, a baby correlates a word with only one, absolutely concrete object. Only with time he is surprised to discover that it turns out that not only his mother is called Mom, but the girl from kindergarten also has a teddy bear. It is difficult for him to realize that different objects can be called the same. Having first encountered this, the child begins to create his own absolutely illogical, at first glance, generalizations. So, with the word “me” he calls not only his favorite ball, but also a lamp, watermelon and even a neighbor. Many parents lose patience in vain attempts to retrain the baby to use words correctly, not understanding that the reason for this behavior lies not at all in stubbornness and harmfulness. In such generalizations, the child always stands on the position of its internal logic. He found something common in the objects, so they should be called the same. It is better to retrain the baby, not forcing him to memorize the meaning of words, and expanding his experience in the knowledge of the world.
Between one and three years of age, a child’s vocabulary increases rapidly, he begins to build sentences and learn grammatical forms. However, it is still difficult for him to pronounce words consisting of a large number of syllables, and many sounds he replaces easier to pronounce. Thus, hissing “sh”, “sh”, “zh”, “zh”, “ch” are often transformed into soft “sh”, “zh”, “zh”, “tsy” (“syalik” – balloon, “tyay” – tea). Consonants “r” and “l” are completely absent or transformed into “l” or “y” (“lyba” – fish);
Often adults have fun imitating a child’s mispronunciation, but this should not be done. Children have a unique ability to hear and notice all the shortcomings of their own speech and, as soon as the development of the articular apparatus allows, get rid of them. Therefore, the child should hear only correct and clear speech from the mouth of an adult who is authoritative for him/her;
In the third year of life, the child already understands well not only specific instructions, but also adult stories about what is not in front of his eyes at the moment, i.e. speech itself. This skill can be developed through short stories with a simple, clear and consistent plot.
Soon in the child’s consciousness words become signs, detached from the objects they denote. In his inept drawings, the baby, thanks to his imagination, sees images of things, animals and people. He catches familiar shapes in almost everything, and it is very important for him that his parents support this play, because it lays the foundation for the development of imaginative thinking.
Disturbing symptoms
A child should be seen by a specialist immediately if he or she:- in 3-4 years pronounces individual words more often than connected phrases, has difficulty memorizing new words, more often repeats part of the question asked to him than answers it, has difficulty showing the adult named objects in a picture book;
- at age 5-6: speaks very little like a younger child, most words are mispronounced, has difficulty selecting them to express his thoughts, cannot remember three-step directions (go first right, then straight, then left), unable to retell a simple story.
A hundred questions a minute.
If from the birth of a child parents make every effort to make him talk as early as possible, then by the time the baby enters the age of “wisdom”, most of them begin to think that so hurriedly and should not have been … They are bombarded with several hundred questions a day: standard, complex, tricky, strange, able to stump, embarrass or shock. But perhaps the most difficult test for parental patience – monotonous repetition of the same question. At first it seems that the child simply did not understand the answer, then – that he forgot. But with each time in the head of even the most caring parent creeps into the idea that the child is just mocking him. In fact, of course, it is not so. The child is extremely important to make sure that everything in the world is in its place, and things are called the same words as five minutes ago. All the knowledge he received earlier starts to put together an organized picture of the world, and words become tools for him.
In no case should a child’s questions be answered sharply, irritably or not at all. Otherwise, the child may well get the idea that adults themselves do not understand anything in the world around them, and the answers to the following questions, he will have to look for himself.
Learning how to tell a story
So, the child has already learned to listen, understand, talk and ask questions. Many parents think that this is the end of the process of speech development, overlooking one extremely important component of communication – the ability to tell stories.
To begin with, this ability can be developed with the help of the so-called “reflected” retelling, when the adult begins the sentence: “Once upon a time…”, and the child continues it. Then the baby should learn to independently retell small stories, fairy tales. He will certainly respond with pleasure to the parents’ request to tell how the day went in kindergarten or about what was recently seen cartoon, and over time will begin to approach such tasks more and more creatively.
Shutterstock/FOTODOM UKRAINE photos were used
