Prerequisites are the first step for the language development as soon as child’s birth. These are the methods in which adult communicate through gestures, facial expressions, imitation, joint attention, eye contact.
The components of pre- requisites include:
- Eye contact and listening: the child recognises human faces and able to discriminate (especially mother’s face from others). Also the child listens to voices and identifies familiar ones.
- Social smile: the child starts smile while interacting with parents when they take turns with sounds, actions, facial expressions.
- Joint attention: the other main factor in which child gives attention to the speakers which help for the development of communication skills.
- Turn taking: this is the basis of communication and interaction. It starts off as taking turns in an activity and moves to taking turns in a verbal interaction.
For example, if an adult pushes the ball towards the child and the child recognizes they should push it back to the adult. As the child becomes older, they recognize when the adult asks for/ requests a response, they should comply.
- If a child is facing problems with pre- requisites then they might have problems with :
- Lack of eye contact or it’s fleeting
- Lack of social smile
- Lack of vocalization
- Lack of attention
- Lack of play
Jewel autism centre
