From Birth to Speech

The fascinating journey of hearing, kick- starts with our birth. The first sounds we hear, the first sounds we produce, the sounds that knit into words, words organized in sentences, filtered through our- initial- need for and our- later on- evolved desire for communication.

Either a parent or a therapist- even when supporting both roles at the same time, we should focus on building a safe bond with our infant, making sure we walk our infant to being a toddler in solid steps all the way.

In every communication chance we get to share with our infant, let’s make sure we maintain a calm and rather quiet environment, minimizing- or even eliminating environmental noise. We can definitely sieze the chance to enhance our infant’s attention span and cultivate its ability to gradually categorize incoming information according to significance, prioritizing the most, against the less important ones.

At the very same time, we should use eye contact in our every communication in order to train our baby in one of the most important pre-linguistic skills. Maintaining eye contact seals the interaction between communicators and provides rich visual stimuli. Through the visual channel, our infant learns to observe, utilize multisensory stimuli, and experiences learning and communication more comprehensively.

But time passes quickly and our infant becomes a baby. A very small person who pays more attention to us, looks us in the eye and observes our lips, watches our facial expressions. At this time- if not earlier- our melodious/singing voice is to be recruited!

Our melodic/singing voice is like a "magic flute" for our baby. It raises interest, helps maintain eye contact and keeps the attention focused on the person speaking. In addition, it best introduces the prosodic features of speech, enhancing auditory memory through repeated rhymes, thus, facilitating learning.

Although our baby is still very young, it is an excellent idea to use real words when communicating with him or her. Both the objects/toys and the actions we present to our baby do not need to be replaced by other, oversimplified words, rather, it is better to use real words, naming properly the objects or actions we are referring to. It would be imprudent to assume that the enrichment of vocabulary is a process achieved at a later stage - infancy perhaps -. Instead we claim that this is a process that matures with us and with our baby. So why not reinforce this path with solid and ready- to- use material?

As I mentioned earlier, learning is the result of repetition. A new knowledge or a novel behavior that emerges once is a potentially random event. A knowledge or behavior that is repeated, creates patterns that are recorded in our long term memory, and it is easier to retrieve, - that is, it becomes acquired knowledge. We very well know, after all, that repetition is the mother of learning.

We motivate our baby to react to sounds by saying "Listen!" , turning him or her (if he or she is in our arms) towards the source of the sound, and adding "I hear something! Can you hear that? I hear...(*source of sound*)", r e p e a t i n g as many times as necessary! We always remember to give our baby time to process the information we have given him/her! It is important at this point to wait for our baby to begin the process of communication. At the same time, we need to wait for him or her to complete his or her babbling before we start the reward. Thus, we enhance communication initiated by our baby.

I have already mentioned the importance of the use of real words when communicating with our baby, instead of oversimplified "baby words". In support of this suggestion, you are prompted to use short phrases and simple sentences instead of single words, adding a really short but accurate description to frame the context. When it comes to communication in clinical settings , the parent is of course included as a communicative partner, sometimes with the therapist, other times with the baby, or even as part of a communication triangle.

Of course we give the baby the time needed to produce the expressions he or she can at the moment. We make sure that the auditory stimuli we give our baby contains emphasized, the word on which we want him to focus his attention at, reflecting volume changes in personal expressions and, of course, as said before, we repeat it several times.