The Talking Four Month Old
Communication Milestones For Early Speech and Language Skills
A Specialist Paediatric Speech-Language Pathologist outlines the early language and communication skills expected at 4 months of age and provides helpful tips.
During an infant's first four months of life, most vocalisations are associated with having basic needs met, such as being hungry or tired. However, there are many other aspects of communication that are also developing during this time.
Early Communication and Language Skills of Four Month Old Infant
- Smiles and laughs
- Squeals
- Has cries specific to requests (hungry, tired)
- Coos a range of vowel sounds
- Experiments with amusing sounds (raspberries)
- Responds to sounds by turning to look (consider having an hearing checked if concerned about infant not responding to loud noises)
- Responds to sounds by vocalising
- Aware of surrounding events
- Calms to sound of familiar voice
- Listens to people talking
- Watches faces and responds to familiar faces
- Starts to take turns
- Starts to babble strings of consonants (e.g. “dadadadada”)
- Explores objects by putting them in their mouth
- Explores objects using their hands
- Holds and shakes rattle
How to Encourage Early Communication and Language Skills in a Four Month Old Infant
Parents are inundated with all kinds of suggestions regarding how to raise a child. Often this may make people feel that unless children have the latest gadgets, their development is going to be delayed. It’s important to remember that for non-fussy infants and toddlers there are plenty of inexpensive play-based ideas to encourage language development.
- Talk to infants
- Smile at infants
- Sing to infants
- Become familiar with nursery rhymes and accompanying actions
- Play music (live or recordings)
- Move in time to music whilst holding infant
- Provide lots of face to face contact so that they can see facial expressions and mouth movements
- Imitate facial expressions of infants back to them
- Imitate sounds that infants make. Follow this with an obvious pause to see if infant responds by smiling, laughing or making the sound again
- Initiate sound play (e.g. farm animal noises, transport noises)
- Babble simple sounds ("mumumum", "dadadada", "bubububub") to an infant's face and then pause as though encouraging him or her to imitate
- Make silly sounds that involve fun facial expressions, such as raspberries and goldfish noises
- Play peek-a-boo
- Provide inexpensive early development toys (rattles, hanging mobiles, musical toys, keys, soft toys, toys with friendly faces, toys that can safely be sucked)
- Look at simple rip-proof books together (cardboard, fabric or plastic pages), verbally labelling objects on pages
At the age of four months there is lots of time ahead for development, so if not all of the above milestones aren't reached it doesn't necessarily indicate a delay (particularly if an infant was born prematurely). However, if they don't continue to develop at an appropriate pace, seek the advice of a paediatrician and/or speech-language therapist/speech pathologist.
