Development of communication and language skills

The monograph provides an overview of the different stages of speech and language acquisition from birth to three years of age, including practical guidelines for the development of communication in speech therapy. It summarizes information from current research and articles from the linguistic, psycholinguistic and psychological-pedagogical perspectives. It contains a detailed description of the speech development of typically developing children from birth to three years of age in terms of the content, formal and pragmatic aspects of speech.

The book is divided into chapters devoted to the stage of pre-speech development, the stage of one-word utterances, the stage of two-word utterances, the stage of bare sentences and the first three-word utterances, the stage of four-word utterances with a developed adverbial part and the stage of conjunctions. In each chapter, the reader will find a general description of the developmental stage and detailed information on the grammatical, semantic and syntactic categories productive at each stage of speech development, including a description of the development of gesture use. The sections entitled Goals of Therapy are practical and contain many activity suggestions. The case studies describe specific activities that have been applied in individual speech therapy.

The publication is intended for speech therapists, special educators, early care workers or university students working with children, whose speech development is delayed or impaired, and inquisitive parents, psychologists and pediatricians. The author is a clinical speech therapist with many years of experience.