Nursery World - Child development: Your guide to the first five years: part 8 Communication

The many ways that young children and adults give and receive messages without using words, and their importance for secure, social relations, are explored by Maria Robinson.

Communication is a subject that not only has links with all of the preceding articles in this series, but also leads into the next, which is about language development. Of course, how can we divide the two, when language is such an essential part of how we communicate with one another?

Think about the definition I found on a website for the communication needs of people who have profound disabilities: 'Communication is any act by which one person gives to or receives from another person information about that person's needs, desires, perceptions, knowledge, or affective states. Communication may be intentional or unintentional, may involve conventional or unconventional signals, may take linguistic or non-linguistic forms, and may occur through spoken or other modes' (www.unm.edu/(approx)devalenz).

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