Speech Language Pathologist
If you are a new parent, you might be wondering what you can do to help your child learn to speak.
If you have an older child, you might be asking yourself, “Is my child’s speech developing normally? Or is my child’s speech delayed?
Whether you are a parent of a baby or older child, you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog, you’ll learn about how speech develops normally and what you can do to help. You’ll also have the opportunity to suggest topics and ask questions. In this blog, we are going to start at the very beginning, and talk about how speech develops from birth. If your child is older, I think you’ll still find some tips that apply to you.
When we think about the early sounds that babies make, we usually think about the cooing sounds, the babbling and so on. Some of these sounds occur by accident as a child is sucking and swallowing. As a child sucks, the tongue comes forward touching the lips and sounds are produced like this……. However, have you ever thought about the role of imitation in learning how to speak?
Pam Marshala, an accomplished speech/language pathologist, in her book, Becoming Verbal with Childhood Apraxia, which was published in 2001, talks about the stages of speech and language development as being fairly predictable. While children hit the developmental milestones within certain age ranges, there is a lot of flexibility and overlapping among the stages. One thing is clear, according to Marshalla, and that is, that the development of words is dependent upon your child’s ability to imitate.
Jean Piaget, a well known psychologist, in the text “Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development by Ginsburg and Opper (1969) stated that children learn to imitate others in four distinct stages.
Let’s talk about how imitation develops and how it coordinates with speech and language development.
During the first stage called the Vocal Contagion Stage, which takes place from birth through approximately 5 months of age, children make sounds for themselves. It’s a form of “self” entertainment. We tend to hear the lip sounds at this time such as bah, wah or mah. First, you’ll hear your child say the same consonant sound repeatedly (bah, bah, bah) and then you’ll hear a variety of consonants (bah, wah, mah) and also, you’ll also hear a variety of vowel sounds produced. (Bah, bee, boh, boo)
Piaget describes these sounds as purposeful and repetitious sound play. An interesting feature of this stage is that when you and your family are talking, your baby will make sounds more often, as if the sounds you are making are “contagious”. However, there is no real imitation or taking of turns going on.
Here’s an experiment you can try. Pick up the phone and pretend to talk to someone. If your baby begins to vocalize, he/she may be going through this stage, That’s why this stage of imitation is called “Vocal Contagion”, because “talking is contagious.”
Here are some things you can do if you child is going through the Vocal Contagion stage.
You can do a variety of motor activities to encourage your child to vocalize. For example, you can tickle your child, toss a ball, blow out and make your lips vibrate, make animal sounds (barking or meowing), laugh, sing, babble like a baby, etc. You can also make sounds with some of the whistles and horns that are party favors. You’re child might be making sounds at the end of sucking. You can make those sounds, too.
If your child says something or perform a motor activity, such as tapping on his/her high chair, you can imitate your child’s movements or sounds as a way of establishing that you are taking turns with your child. Turntaking is an essential feature of carrying on a conversation. It doesn’t matter what your child says because your goal during this time period is to respond to your child movements or sounds.
In stage two, called Mutual Imitation, which typically takes place between 5 and 7 months of age, you child begins to imitate himself or herself. Even if you vocalize and take turns with your child, your child will only imitate himself. Turntaking is establishing but your child still does not imitate others. By the end of the Mutual Imitation stage, your child begins to understand how what he/she does is related to what you are doing.
Here are some things you can do during the Mutual Imitation Stage:
Try to catch your child talking and imitate what your child says. Pam Marshalla suggests three ways to help your child develop words. Echo your child, Echo and then correct your child or Echo and then expand what your child says. In the following example, assume that your child is looking at an apple and naming it. When you Echo your child, you say exactly what your child says. If your child says “ball”, then you say ‘ball”. When you Echo correct your child, if your child says, “ball”, you say “ball- apple”. When you use Echo expansion, you imitate what you child says and expand what your child says to include more information. An example would be where your child says “ball” and you say, “That apple looks like a ball.”
A rule of thumb to keep in mind is that the speech you model should be only slightly longer and/or slightly more complex than your child’s speech. If you child says, “cookie”, then a response such as, “I love those chocolate chip cookies we baked at grandma’s house” would be way too long and too complex to say to a child at the single word stage. A more appropriate model would be “good cookie” or “yummy cookie”.
You can also model correct pronunciation by echoing your child exactly or by repeating what your child says and then saying the word with the correct pronunciation. For example, if your child calls a puppy, “buh-bee”, you can repeat what your child says and then provide the correct word as in “buh-bee, puppy” and you can expand your child’s speech further as in “Buh-bee, puppy, what a nice puppy.”
It’s important to focus more on the process of learning to imitate rather than the accuracy of your child’s pronunciation. It takes eight years for all of the speech sounds to be fully acquired. Keeping that in mind will help to keep the learning process in perspective.
In stage three, referred to as Spontaneous Imitation of Old Repertoire, children will repeat words “on demand” but only if the words imitated were previously spoken by the child and in his/her repertoire. If you ask your child to say a word he/she hasn’t said before, your child typically will not imitate it. This stage is typically observed between six and ten months of age.
Here are some things you can do during this stage of Spontaneous Imitation of Familiar Words:
- Keep a log of words your child has said so you know which words you can model for your child. Say those words in an appropriate context so that your child can associate the word with an object or an event to which the word is related.
- You can vary the way you talk to your child. You can ask, “What’s this?” (A book) or use sentence completion, “I read a _____”.
- Acknowledge what your child says by commenting “Oh, you said book again”.
During the fourth and final stage of imitation, called Spontaneous Imitation of New Repertoire, children spontaneously imitate words that were not previously in their repertoire. According to Piaget, this stage typically occurs between 10 and 14 months of age. While the imitation may not be perfect, your child understands what he/she is expected to do and if your child is in the “right mood”, he/she should be able to imitate new words that you say.
During the fourth stage of imitation, you can:
- Model new words. Try to talk about the words within the appropriate context to help your child understand the meaning. Some words are more powerful than others. For example, words such as “more” and “want” enable a child to get something. And don’t we just love it when our child learns to say the word, “no”.
- You can also model new sounds in the words you say, but don’t expect your child to be able to say them correctly. As noted previously, speech sounds are learned in a developmental progression which is not complete until eight years of age.
This blog addressed how children learn to imitate and how the ability to imitate directly relates to a child’s ability to learn to speak, a topic originally presented by Pam Marshalla in an inspiring lecture on Speech Pathology.com, an on line professional development site.
The four stages discussed take place during the first year of life in typically developing children and they include:
Stage one, the Vocal Contagion Stage, where a child is more vocal when others are talking.
Stage two, the Mutual Imitation Stage, where turn taking is established with you imitating your child and your child taking a turn, but not yet imitating your speech.
Stage three, Spontaneous Imitation of Familiar Words, where a child spontaneously imitates words within his old repertoire and finally,
Stage four, the Spontaneous Imitation of Unfamiliar words, which is true imitation in that your child is able to imitate words that are new.
Keep in mind that your child may be older than a year of age and may not have reached the final stage of imitation. If you find that your two, three or even four year old child does not imitate familiar or unfamiliar words and has language or speech delays, you can still follow the suggestions included in this podcast to help your child’s speech and language skills develop.
I hope you’ve found today’s topic of interest and relevant to your child. If you’d like to suggest a topic, feel free to email your suggestion to TalkingKidz@gmail.com
I’d love to hear from you and I welcome your suggestions.
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