your child’s first communication system

Most people are taught to look for words. When a child is not yet speaking, communication is often assumed to be absent, or not yet arrived. It is one of the most natural assumptions a parent or professional can make, and one of the most consequential to get wrong.

Part of the difficulty is in the language itself. Terms such as “pre-verbal” and “non-verbal” describe what a child is not yet doing, and they quietly carry an idea along with them: that communication begins with speech, and that everything before it is a kind of waiting room. It is a limited way to see a child, and it is not how communication actually develops.

Communication does not begin with speech. Speech is one form of communication, a powerful, flexible one, but it is not the foundation underneath it. Decades of research into early development describe communication as something built long before words: out of shared attention, gesture, gaze, and emotion passed back and forth between a child and the people around them (Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001; Bruner, 1983).

So when a child is described as “not communicating”, it is almost always more accurate to say that their communication is not yet being recognised.

Before words emerge, autistic children are already taking part in systems of attention, action, sensory regulation, and interaction. Looking, reaching, body positioning, vocalising, and movement are not random behaviours that simply fill the time before language. They are organised, meaningful ways of making sense of experience, and, in many moments, of signalling something to another person. It helps to slow down and look at each one.

Where a child looks, and when they look away, is rarely accidental. Gaze is one of the earliest ways a child directs and shares attention, noticing something, showing interest, checking in with a trusted adult, or stepping back from input that has become too much. Long before a child can say “look at that”, their eyes are already doing part of the work (Mundy & Newell, 2007).

When a child reaches, pulls your hand, or guides you toward something they want, they are expressing intent. I want that. Help me. Take me there. These are early acts of requesting, genuine communication, even when they arrive without words, and even without the pointing that adults are so often told to watch for.

The body communicates before words do. The way a child orients, leaning in, turning toward you, or turning away, carries information about how they are managing the interaction. Turning toward can signal readiness and interest. Turning away can signal that the moment has become overwhelming, or that they need a little space. Neither one is a refusal to connect; both are telling you something real.

And not all sounds are “just noise”. Long before words, vocalisations carry meaning, excitement, distress, the quiet work of self-regulation, or a real attempt to engage and take a turn. These sounds are part of a communication system, not separate from it, and they are some of the clearest invitations a child offers.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to treat everything a child does as a message. Not all behaviour is communication.

Some behaviours mainly serve a regulatory function. Repetitive or patterned movements, rocking, pacing, spinning, seeking pressure, can help a child stabilise sensory input, manage their level of arousal, or hold attention steady. They are doing something important, but they are not necessarily aimed at anyone. And yet, within an interaction, those same behaviours can take on communicative meaning: a child who moves away to regulate is also, in that very moment, telling you something about how the environment feels to them.

It matters in both directions. If we treat all behaviour as communication, we risk over-interpreting a child, reading intention into movements that are simply helping them cope. If we treat none of it as communication, we risk missing the genuine bids for connection that are already there, and the child slowly learns that reaching out does not bring a response.

The task, then, is to understand function first, what is this behaviour doing for the child?, and only then to ask how it works within interaction. Regulating, requesting, protesting, connecting: these are different things, and telling them apart is what lets us respond well.

None of this is a soft idea. Research in early development consistently shows that communication exists before speech, through joint attention, gesture, gaze, and shared affect, and that these early, pre-verbal systems are precisely what later language is built upon (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998; Adamson et al., 2014). For autistic children in particular, careful study of these early communicative acts has reshaped how we understand the years before fluent speech (Shumway & Wetherby, 2009; Wetherby & Prizant, 1992).

What makes the biggest difference is what happens next. When a child’s early communication is noticed and responded to, when a glance is met, a reach is answered, a sound is taken as a turn in a conversation, interaction becomes more aligned, more responsive, and more meaningful. The child experiences, again and again, that communicating works. That is the ground language grows from.