North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Language Development and Communication (LDC)

Subdomain: Learning to Communicate

Goal: Children understand communications from others.

Skill Progression: Understand communication from others

Age: 6-8 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 6-8 Months.

Responds to own name with head turn, eye contact, or smile

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe the child’s face as people talk near her.

Elicitation Strategy

Call the child’s name and watch the reaction.

Behavior Observed

The infant recognizes her name and turns toward the speaker.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Children learn that part of communication is tone and inflection. Attaching meaning to inflection and tone is an important step in comprehension of what someone is trying to communicate. Help early childhood educators and parents understand the importance of consistency in communication. Facial expressions, tone, intonation, and words need to be congruent. Otherwise, children receive a mixed, and confusing, message.

 North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2015

©2015 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.