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Infant/Toddler Language Development

Language Development and Mobile Infants

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Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• Examine how mobile infants use gestures, abbreviations and signals to communicate.

• Demonstrate how care teachers foster language development by treating gestures as early attempts at conversation and responding to infants’ communication with respectful conversational turn-taking.

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Jigsaw Activity• Read your assigned section from “The Mobile Infant:

Emergence of Communication; Give-and-Take Between Adult and Child”.

• Each group is to answer the following questions:1. What were the key points from the section that

you read?

2. What did you learn that will be helpful to you in understanding how to facilitate mobile infants’ language development?

3. How will you share this information with families?

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Intentional Communication

• First conversations. From 8 to 12 months, infants move from using crying, cooing, laughing to using deliberate actions that convey meaning.

• These actions are initially not verbal, but gestural (e.g., waving goodbye, shaking head for no, or reaching with an opening and closing hand and saying “ah-ah-ah” to ask for a toy).

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Back-and-Forth Conversation • The new experience of being able to communicate

intentions successfully motivates the child to “keep talking”, trying out more gestures and more vocalizations.

• As the care teacher responds with words to the infant’s request, the infant hears the labels for objects.

• Care teachers can support language in this stage by treating all gestures and vocalizations as beginning conversations and responding to the infant’s communication with respectful conversational turn-taking.

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BREAK

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Activity: What Care TeachersCan Do to Support Language

• Each group is to come up with at least three examples of how you are currently practicing these strategies in your work with children.

• Develop strategies for improving how you support language development in your work with young infants.

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Communication Skills and Knowledge at 8 months

At about 8 months, infants participate in back-and-forth communication and games.

After watching the video clip, answer the following questions:

• How were the children initiating conversations?

• What did the care teachers do to encourage back and forth conversations?

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Communication Skills and Knowledge at 18 months

At 18 months, infants follow the basic rules of conversational turn-taking with adults and peers.After watching the video clip, answer the

following questions:

• What did you notice about how the children communicated with each other?

• What conversational “rules” were they following?

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Dyad: Strategies for Supporting Mobile Infants

• With a partner, review handout #27 and #28 outlining language development and developmental milestones for mobile infants.

• Develop a strategy to support language development for infants 6 to 8 months; 8 to 12 months; and 12 to 18 months.

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Summary

• At this stage, we begin to see more clearly the role language plays in the infant’s social development.

• The development of verbal language is instrumental in helping mobile infants to develop relationships not only with adults but with their peers.

• This is the period of rapid language growth. Care teachers support mobile infants’ language development by being respectful active listeners and turn-takers.