Body language, including facial expression, accompanies most human speech to gain effective communication. It supports speech, helping to clarify meaning and making it more accessible to the listener. Only when you speak to someone who cuts out facial expression and gestures do you realise the important role that both play in conveying meaning. Some people find them so much a part of speech that they even use them while talking on the telephone!
Babies have an innate drive to communicate and socialise and in so doing satisfy their powerful desire to find out about their world. They learn language more easily when the person with whom they are having a dialogue uses 'parentese' or infant- directed speech ('First Words', Nursery World, 1 April). Exaggerated and dramatised body language is a natural part of parentese. Babies acquire it and begin to use it to communicate in the babbling stage, between six and 15 months, before they can say words. By three years most children's body language resembles that of adults who regularly hold dialogue with them. Bilingual children acquire the different forms of body language linked to their two languages and most, by the age of three, rarely seem to confuse them.
Copying gestures
Babies acquire body language, like speech, through imitation. However, from six to 15 months, the development of body language and ability to say words is not synchronised. Before babies can utter their first words, they develop gestures to communicate their needs, thoughts and feelings.
In this period babbling is a vital pre-verbal practice, helping babies to adapt to the developing mouth cavity (including new teeth), and find out about the lips and tongue and how to blow air past their developing vocal cords rather than sucking. During this period, babies develop finer muscular control which enables them to imitate hand and arm gestures as well as facial expressions used by others.
Babies understand much more than they are capable of communicating during this period, which can cause them frustration. Most well babies cope naturally with their inability to verbalise by developing their vocabulary of gestures. They naturally shake their heads from side to side for no and up and down for yes.
When adults recognise and praise gestures, babies are stimulated to continue gesturing and create their own. As they develop finer muscular control they refine the quality of gestures, so by the time they reach 12 months they begin to use some gestures together with accompanying words or phrases. As their ability to verbalise increases, language becomes more important and gestures fade to take their place among regular body language. Vigorous pointing at objects at eight months gradually diminishes as toddlers use naming words.
Value for effort
Gestures and signs play an important role in helping children to become skilful communicators:
- They help to dissipate frustration and tension as babies feel they are communicating when their gestures get some reaction.
- Gestures increase opportunities for deeper communication and improve bonding and the feel-good factor.
- Research suggests that gestures increase and consolidate brain connections, which contributes to earlier verbalisation.
- When adults respond to babies' gestures, enthusiastically mirroring them and praising, it stimulates and provides further acquisition experiences.
- Gestures are helpful to boys, who are often later verbal communicators and may need to alleviate physical frustration and stress.
- The extra effort and time given by the adult to develop and respond to gestures makes baby feel good.
Introducing gestures
Parentese includes the use of gesture. When you first use a gesture, the physical movement tends to be exaggerated, even dramatised, and is accompanied by stressed intonation, both of which help the baby to focus.
When you first introduce a universal sign, baby is likely to make no physical reaction although some learning will have taken place.
Baby's first attempts to make a sign may be unrecognisable except to those adults they have closely bonded with. It is important to praise any effort and mirror baby's sign, confirming it with parentese.
As baby develops, motor skills are continually refined, as is the ability to imitate. In the first attempts to wave bye-bye, the hand may be partially lifted and not moved. As more control develops, the hand is moved up and down without any movement of the fingers, which comes later.
The first signs used can be a choice of universal signs or the baby's own sign based on their experience. Other signs can be focused on as the opportunity arises and when baby is ready, so a repertoire of gestures gradually builds up. Baby will watch and in time imitate when learning has taken place. Pushing baby to perform before they are ready gains little except satisfaction for adults.
Universal signs are easier for adults to introduce, as they are familiar and recognisable to others. Whatever the gesture, it should always be made with exactly the same movements. Any small difference can confuse baby in the initial stages of imitating. Repetition and yet more repetition may seem boring to adults, but babies enjoy it and also need it, as it helps to consolidate brain connections. Be prepared to make the same sign repeatedly and let baby do the same.
Gestures may be named using one word, such as 'hungry', or a phrase, such as 'all gone'. They should be accompanied by parentese explaining the situation, repeating and rephrasing the accompanying language and scaffolding the experience where appropriate. For example: 'Oh, you're hungry. Wait a minute while I get something. Let me see. How about a biscuit?' Holding up a biscuit.
'Yes, please?' Nodding the head up and down with a smile, to which baby may reply with a smile or both hands held out to take the biscuit. 'Here you are.' Giving baby the biscuit.
Using rhyme and books
Picture story books can help to confirm babies' understanding of universal gestures such as smiling to greet, clapping to say hoorah or hugging to show love.
- Books provide opportunities for babies to refine their ability to make gestures. Over many readings, babies gradually refine their movements and even add more expression.
- Books provide a framework to broaden experiences, using gestures and transferring language beyond baby's environment. Song books help to confirm gestures with pictures.
- Books provide babies with opportunities to browse and absorb experiences in their own time and at their own speed.
- Stories provide opportunities for natural repetition.
Encouraging babies to make gestures in this pre-verbal stage is an important step to developing verbalisation. Babies who are encouraged to gesture get satisfaction and stimulation from adults' enthusiastic responses. The adults' response helps babies to appreciate the depth, power and joys of communicating which in turn contributes to developing verbalisation. Those babies who are not encouraged to develop their innate ability to use gesture, and consequently have little experience in successful communication at this stage, may take longer to talk.
Gesturing, however, is only part of the continuum of language development that depends on the amount and quality of language that babies hear. Without the continual flow of appropriate parentese dialogues, babies will be deprived of the necessary wealth of language experience they need to work out how sounds are put together and language works - the foundations necessary for becoming skilful communicators.
