How To Support Early Communication

How do I best support communication in my infant and/or toddler?

This episode of the Learn With Less podcast was produced in partnership with the San Francisco Moms Blog. In this episode, Ayelet sits down with Kelly Arditi, founder of the San Francisco Moms Blog. San Francisco Moms Blog is part of the well known City Moms Blog Network. It is written by local moms for local moms and provides resources, recommendations, support and community philanthropy through their website, videos, social media platforms, and events.

Today, we flip the script and have Kelly interview Ayelet about how to support early communication in infants and toddlers. We cover the various areas of communication development, how to support speech & language development (using Ayelet’s 4-step framework which you can download here in the Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint), early communication milestones, when to seek help, and a few tips and tricks about playing with a tiny baby, using Baby Sign Language, supporting bilingual language development, as well as a few words about Ayelet’s bestselling book, Understanding Your Baby.

Plus, a big announcement about Ayelet’s next book, Understanding Your Toddler!

Early Communication in infants and toddlers

Kelly: Hi Guys, I’m Kelly with San Francisco Mom’s Blog, and I am so excited to be here with our contributing writer, the founder of Learn With Less and the Learn With Less podcast, and author of Understanding Your Baby. Yes, I keep going on and she’s a speech pathologist and a mom. Ayelet Marinovich (did I say it right?)

Ayelet: You did so well, Kelly, that’s very impressive.

Kelly: And today we’re talking about how to support early communication with your baby and your toddler, and how to interact and play with them. And we have a couple questions that were sent in, so we’ll go over those at the end. I did link her book, so please take a look in the comment section. And my son is home sick today. Yes. Authentic parenting life at its best. So he’s sitting right here with a popsicle and some books. But please don’t be alarmed if you hear him playing in the background. Okay. So let’s go ahead and start. Tell us a little bit about early communication and the different parts, and things like that.

Ayelet: Sure. So in the first three years, well not actually just in the first three years, but when we break down communication development, we’re looking at a few different areas, right? We’re looking at speech, which is that actual, like, motor component of articulating sounds, and then we’re looking at language, which is both the input (which we refer to as receptive language) and then the output (which we refer to as expressive language). And within the area of language, we have a few different things, as well.

Things like phonology, which are the basic speech sounds, like ah, oo, b, d, those kinds of things. We have morphology, which are all the units of meaning, right? Those tiny, teeny pieces like plural markers, right? We have syntax, which is grammar. And then we have semantics, which is vocabulary, and then we have pragmatics, which is the social use of language. So, there are all different kinds of areas that we look at when we think ...