The SLP Next Door Podcast

Prelinguistic Skills are the foundation for all language and communication across the first 2 years of life.

Here’s the thing: if a child is lacking in one of these areas, it will lead to difficulties in language development. Understanding these skills helps providers and caregivers/parents determine how a child communicates and progresses through language acquisition and use.

More importantly- these are the skills we want to fall back on whenever we aren’t seeing progress in speech therapy for toddlers.

Here are the 11 prelinguistic skills:

• Responding to others and their environment:
• Turn-taking
• Attention to task
• Joint Attention
• Playing with a variety of toys
• Understands words
• Follows directions
• Vocalizes purposefully
• Imitates simple actions, vocalizations, words
• Use of gestures
• Initiates communication

Consider this episode a huge overview of these skills. If you find yourself in a session with a little one who doesn’t seem to be making progress or is struggling to meet your expectations on something- step back and reassess their skillset.

You have to look beyond “they just won't talk.”

I’ve created a prelinguistic skills checklist for you! You’ll also find printable handouts of these prelinguistic skills with more details, examples, and strategies to help you talk with parents about their child’s skills.

Additionally, you’ll find a checklist of prelinguistic skills and a chart to help you monitor a child’s progress!

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