When will my son talk?

By: Tania Bello

When we become parents, we are attentive to every stage of our children's development from pregnancy onwards, savoring each phase or new acquisition, while at the same time worrying when some things don't seem to happen the way we believe they should.

One of the frequent concerns in child development is the emergence of oral language, that is, the beginning of "speech", which becomes a cause for concern for parents, who often see their child running around the house, touching everything with very curious eyes, but who, when they want something, doesn't speak a word, just points, and the parents, knowing the child's desire, understand and comply with their request.

As time goes by, the worry arises: "Won't he talk?".

This fear is natural, after all, language is a major acquisition in human life, of fundamental importance in interpersonal relationships, and its development is linked to thought: speech is the oral expression of language, a production that is associated with mental functions.

Language is a process that is built up by children long before they speak their first meaningful word. Before being able to speak, the child has a language repertoire, acquired through the experiences they have had so far, which is constantly modified and expanded by their life experiences.

When speaking a word, such as balloon, for example, the child has already seen a balloon, played with it, felt it and handled it, heard the sound of it popping and often heard the word balloon said by someone else at the same time as the object balloon was present. In this way, the child makes associations until they utter the word.

It's important to note that, initially, these utterances are different from adult speech at all linguistic levels. At first, utterances consist of a single word, usually a noun, which encapsulates the entire meaning of the message, such as saying "baoon" (balloon) with the intention of asking for the balloon. Gradually, the child incorporates words into their vocabulary and the structure of their sentences also expands. For example, they start to say "Gie baoon" to make the request. This development continues gradually, so that words from other grammatical classes are incorporated, such as articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions, which bring the utterance ever closer to the standard of the language in which the child is inserted.

Also in terms of sound, children's speech develops gradually. Generally, they first acquire sounds that are more visible to people, such as "p", "b" and "m", which are pronounced using lip movements, and then they acquire sounds that are less visible in terms of their production and require more refined movements of the tongue, such as "r" (for train) and "l" (for club).

In order for this development to take place properly, children need to be provided with language models that stimulate them appropriately, so that by listening to these models and comparing them with their own pattern, they can arrive at the language pattern. In this way, adults must resist the temptation to speak to children by imitating the child's pattern, which may seem very cute, but which deprives the child of the comparison that will help them evolve in their linguistic development.

Check out the next blog post for suggestions on language stimulation!