“Prelinguistic” is a term that means before speech; there are a group of skills (11 in total)
called prelinguistic skills that a child must acquire before verbal speech/language skills are
developed appropriately. Meaning, these prelinguistic skills are the building blocks required to
successfully transition from non-verbal (gestural) to verbal communication.
These 11 prelinguistic skills can be sorted into 4 broad categories: social skills, receptive
language/cognition, expressive language, and finally speech intelligibility.
*The skills listed below are numbered in ascending order in terms of typical age of acquisition (#1 is typically developed first, #2
is typically developed second, and so on).
Social Skills
Skill #2 Responds to People
Skill #3 Turn Taking
Skill #5 Joint Attention (eye-contact between a person and an object to indicate a want/need)
Skill #11 Initiation
Receptive Language/Cognition
Skill #1 Responds to the Environment
Skill #4 Develops a Longer Attention Span
Skill #6 Plays with a Variety of Toys
Skill #7 Understands Words and Follows Directions
Expressive Language
Skill #8 Vocalizes Purposefully (using vowel or consonant sounds; not behavioral grunting).
Skill #9 Imitates
Skill #10 Uses Gestures to Communicate
Speech Intelligibility
Speech intelligibility refers to the motoric ability to use various speech sounds (consonant and
vowel sounds) in a variety of different Consonant-and-Vowel patterns (represented in C’s and
V’s, respectively; i.e.- CV, VC, CVCV, CVC, CVCVCV, C1VC2VC3V).
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Toddlers and younger preschoolers should be talking frequently, using lots of phrases
pulled from their core vocabularies of several hundreds of words – meaning their
language skills are near an age or developmentally appropriate level before explicitly
targeting speech intelligibility.
Looking forward; taking the next step into linguistic communication
generally follows a predictable sequence of events as well:
Adequate use of all prelinguistic skills  single words to convey entire thought  2-words to convey entire
thought  Multi-word (3+ word) telegraphic-type sentences to convey more specific thought  more
complex grammatical structures  adult-like language and grammatical structures.