Yoga for Speech-Language Development

Yoga for Prelinguistic Communication 55

during the earliest months from birth to about three months,
infants focus on the challenge of self-regulation and use their
senses to develop interest in the world around them. Following
this initial period, up to about seven months, infants focus on
forming relationships with their caregivers and engaging in
affective vocal synchrony with them. These two stages map onto
the preintentional stage of language development. In the second
half of the first year, infants enter the intentional stage of language
development with the prelinguistic child engaging in purposeful,
two-way communication as its hallmark. In Greenspan’s (1985)
model of social-emotional development, intentional two-way
communication at 8 to 12 months is key.
Prelinguistic communication refers to the infant’s intentional
engagement with another through nonlinguistic means,
namely gestures, gaze, and vocalizations. Infants often use these
prelinguistic  forms of communication in combination with
one another. For example, a baby might gaze and vocalize or
gesture at his  caregiver or produce all three prelinguistic forms
of communication simultaneously. In this way, infants can
communicate a variety of intentions such as expressing feelings
and sharing in joint action routines. These prelinguistic forms and
functions of communication are evident before the emergence of
first words, which was discussed in Chapter 2. Further as noted in
Chapter 3, yoga classes for infants and their caregivers provide a
context for facilitating prelinguistic communication skills, such as
eye gaze, shared attention, and turn-taking, which are manifestations
of the infants’ engagement with their caregivers. A challenge with
engagement with others is a core feature of autism spectrum
disorders (ASD) (American Psychiatric Association 2013) and
a characteristic of several other clinical populations. In addition,
caregiver-baby yoga at the prelinguistic stage, as well as yoga classes
for children in the later stages of language development, fosters the
comprehension of language in the context of simple routines.