Overview of Communication Skills (continued)

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Children's language is referred to as a monologue when they talk out loud to themselves. Children often use this type of noncommunicative language during solitary play (while playing alone) (Berk, 1992). When many children sit together and talk, but not to each other, a collective monologue is being used. This type of language may help guide problem-solving. For example, a child may think aloud and say, "My tower is tall. I'd better be careful or it'll fall down." When preschoolers think aloud in monologues, they are often guiding their own thoughts and actions by communicating with themselves. For example, a four-year-old, while putting toys away might say, "This goes over here." A child who talks out loud also engages in positive self-talk such as, "I can do this." Children who use this type of self-talk are more likely to have a positive self-esteem than children who use negative self-talk such as, "I can't do this."

Children often control their impulses by inner speech, cautioning themselves as their parents would. This speech type may be seen when a child tries to stay out of the cookie jar by thinking or saying, "Wait until after dinner!" Inner speech helps direct children's thinking as they mature. During early childhood, inner speech begins as a whisper or mutter to oneself, and, as the child matures, self-talk (a form of inner speech) becomes silent talking, thinking inside the head (Greene, 1975). Inner speech, however, does not disappear altogether. Most people use it from time to time by saying things like, "I can't believe I did that," "I can't believe how that person is driving," or "I need to be more careful!"

By three or four years old, most children's vocabulary increases rapidly. At this time, children's language typically uses the basic rules of speech and grammar, the set of rules that govern how words are used, combined, and altered in a language (Bernstein & Teigerman, 1989). Children use simple sentences that follow a subject-verb-object word order. Children at three-and-a-half years have typically mastered the basic rules of grammar so well they frequently overapply the rules to words that are exceptions, called overregularization (Behren, 1988). For example, they may say, "The childs goed to the store." Although this sentence is not grammatically correct, it does indicate that the child understands that plurals are made by adding -s and the past tense is indicated by adding -ed.

Throughout the preschool years, children's communication skills continue to become more effective. They tell others what they want and may use language to manipulate how others perceive a situation. Preschoolers though, frequently cannot describe important features of objects. For example, a three-and-a-half-year-old tells an adult to take down a truck from the closet shelf. If the shelf has several trucks on it, the child may have difficulty clearly communicating the desired truck (Peccei,1994).