What preverbal communication tells us about the origins of meaning: field notes from a preschool

Hannah Speechly

In a classroom of two-year-olds, language is still “under construction”. Moments such as a child pointing towards the snack shelf looking expectedly at you, or another child tugging your sleeve and silently leading you to the block area, might seem cute (they are), but they’re also profoundly communicative. Even before children reliably speak in sentences, they’re clearly making themselves understood. And often, they’re doing so with surprising nuance. Working in early childhood education, I’ve come to see that the boundary between verbal and nonverbal communication is not as sharp as it seems. Particularly in classrooms like mine, which serve a diverse population of children, children rely on gestures, vocal tone, gaze, and action to express complex thoughts long before they have the words to match. While verbal language tends to take center stage in developmental research, these preverbal behaviors are more foundational than simply preliminary. If language is a cultural tool for making thought public, then preverbal communication reveals what that thought looks like before it becomes codified in grammar or vocabulary.

Too often, developmental research treats nonverbal communication as a stepping stone to speech: foundational, sure, but it’s treated as ultimately subordinate. But what if that gets things backwards? These early embodied interactions raise deeper questions: What does it mean to know something if you cannot say it? How do children coordinate minds before they coordinate syntax? Observing two-year-olds communicate without (or beyond) words invites us to rethink what language is for, and what it grows out of.

The 2-year-old communicator

At age two, children live squarely at the threshold of language. They know words (sometimes dozens, occasionally hundreds) but they don’t yet speak fluently. In our classrooms, this in-between stage is strikingly apparent. Some children speak in short two- or three-word utterances; others communicate almost entirely through gestures, grunts, and/or memorized phrases. Yet even the “quietest” children are deeply expressive. They use every available tool to communicate: reaching, pointing, making eye contact, guiding an adult’s hand, or repeating a favorite sound with just the right intonation. Language isn’t absent at this stage, it’s just not (yet) fully verbal.

This transitional space between preverbal and verbal communication is rich with developmental significance. Children are actively learning how language works in not only vocabulary and grammar, but also its pragmatics: how to use words (or actions) to meet goals, share experiences, and manage relationships. In this way, preverbal communication isn’t really something they “grow out of”. It’s a core part of how they learn to navigate the world. Critically, these behaviors often fill in for linguistic gaps while children are acquiring one language, and especially when they are acquiring two.

For many of our students, English is a school language, while another language (Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, etc.) is spoken at home. At age two, they are often in the early stages of grasping both systems. They may understand a great deal in both languages, but hesitate to speak, especially in unfamiliar contexts. This doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking. Quite the opposite: we often see children use nonverbal strategies to compensate across linguistic environments. A child might say “agua” quietly to himself, then point at the water fountain and look up at the teacher, waiting for a response. Another might silently copy a peer’s play routine to absorb both action and language before attempting either for herself.

In these moments, communication is happening across modes (gesture, gaze, prosody, touch, space) not just across languages. Dual language learners often excel at this kind of flexible, adaptive expression. Their “errors” or silences often mask sophisticated internal processing and strategic code-switching even before they’re conscious of doing so. And as educators, we see firsthand how much communicative intention exists beneath the surface of limited verbal output.

This is why it’s misleading to think of two-year-olds as simply “not talking yet”. Many are communicating constantly and effectively, just not always in words. Recognizing this is not only developmentally appropriate, it’s also essential for honoring the full range of meaning-making strategies children bring to the classroom. In observing their behavior closely, we gain insight into how language emerges as a socially embedded practice that begins well before a child can name what they’re doing.

The slow build to the “explosion”

Between the ages of 30 and 36 months, many children experience what caregivers call a “language explosion”, or an apparent burst of fluency and expressive power that seems like it happened overnight. This phase often unfolds as if a dam has broken: toddlers who once relied on gestures and single words suddenly string together phrases, narrate their play, negotiate with peers, and ask vivid questions. This shift is hardly a miracle; it’s an emergent result of groundwork laid in the preverbal period.

Research supports this trajectory. For instance, studies of joint attention (a behavior toddlers use extensively before they can talk) find that the frequency of gesture-plus-word combinations around age two strongly predicts multiword speech by 3.5 years (Alhama et al., 2024; Hadley et al., 2018; McEachern & Haynes, 2004), highlighting how nonverbal signaling (like pointing or gazing) scaffolds verbal development. Other research demonstrates a clear developmental slope before the "explosion". One study of sentence diversity in Spanish-English toddlers between 24 and 30 months reported that bilingual children begin producing flexible subject-verb utterances in both of their languages, showing distinct grammatical patterns by age 2.5 years (De Anda et al., 2023). As such, toddlers are assembling language systems even before long sentences emerge. Meanwhile, monolingual and bilingual children show similar trajectories in lexical-semantic organization at 18-24 months, suggesting that underlying cognitive structures (e.g. mapping words to concepts) are already taking shape before expressive grammar blooms (De Anda & Friend, 2020). For dual language learners, this lexical organization relies on a rich semantic network that spans both languages. This network then serves as a basis for the rapid verbal shift as their language fluency builds. 

Importantly, the preschool environment also plays a crucial role. Dual language learners benefit significantly when their home language is supported in early childhood settings: teachers' use of the home language correlates with stronger vocabulary, comprehension, executive function, and social–emotional outcomes. Likewise, high-quality responsive interaction is linked to richer language and pragmatic skill development (De Anda & Friend, 2020; Gámez et al., 2023). When children experience consistent and nurturing multimodal input (hand gestures, voice prosody and intonation, eye gaze, etc.), they develop the scaffolding essential for that vocal burst.

These findings, combined with my general observations over the last 6 months, suggest the following developmental model. During the pre-language foundation phase from 24 to 30 months, children rely heavily on gesture, joint attention, limited word usage, and single-word utterances to build shared meaning and develop conceptual networks with their caregivers. Around 30 months, we see “structural emergence”, where children begin combining words for the first time, demonstrating early syntactic abilities and referential flexibility that becomes particularly pronounced in dual-language contexts. This culminates in the language “explosion” that typically occurs between 30 and 36 months, when verbal communication accelerates dramatically. By the time a child suddenly begins speaking fluently, they’ve already been preparing for months (whether through gestures, vocal tones and “babbling”, or cognitively).

What preverbal communication reveals about the nature of meaning

Underlying toddler gesture and joint-attentional behavior is shared intentionality - a deeply human capacity. Michael Tomasello’s framework posits that infants begin coordinating attention and goals with others as early as 9-12 months (Tomasello, 2010; Tomasello, 2019; Wolf & Tomasello, 2023). Pointing and pantomiming are deliberate acts organized within cooperative settings; infants use these to request, inform, and emotionally share with an implicit understanding that their partner will share attention towards the referent (Forgács, 2024; Player & Hartmann, 2024; Terrace et al., 2022).

By age one, children begin engaging in triadic joint attention to coordinate with caregivers around objects or events while acknowledging this shared awareness through gaze, gesture, and expression (Terrace et al., 2022). This triadic relation inaugurates the “meeting of minds” moment crucial to the emergence of meaning. Even before words appear, toddlers are learning how meaning is negotiated socially and dependent on a shared epistemic space. Tomasello’s evolution of communication theory also distinguishes between joint intentionality (early toddlerhood) and collective intentionality, which emerges around age three alongside understanding of norms and conventions (Tomasello, 2018). Once children grasp collective intentionality, they begin to collaborate on tasks with normative expectations; this “sets the stage” for syntactic language and conventional grammar.

Gestural communication in the preverbal years reveals three fundamental insights. First, that meaning precedes grammar. Preverbal acts like pointing constitute communicative intentions that help establish common ground and shared reference, all of which are prerequisites for naming and describing. Second, that social cognition underpins meaning. Mind-reading, perspective-taking, and cooperative motivation are active from infancy, and these support shared meaning before verbalization. Finally, there is a cultural element emerging alongside language; over time, these embodied shared experiences become encoded into conventional language systems, such as words, grammar, and turn-taking norms. Furthermore, infant vocal play supports that human infants explore vocalization purposefully and flexibly, unlike nonhuman primates (Oller et al., 2013). This early vocal flexibility alongside gestural communication not only helps scaffold infants towards full linguistic competence, but also suggests that meaning is moreso tied to the infrastructure of shared experience rather than the words themselves. Toddlers are communicating meanings, intentions, desires, and referents long before they can map those onto verbal form.

What the preschool teaches us about origins of meaning

If you want to understand the origins of meaning, a preschool classroom is a better starting place than a dictionary. In the classrooms I’ve worked in, meaning is in constant motion. It’s passed in glances across the lunch tables, built with wooden blocks, negotiated with gestures and touch, and clarified through laughter. Children learn both language and the communicative scaffolding that language will eventually inhabit. And for many two-year-olds, especially dual-language learners, that scaffolding is preverbal.

A lot of developmental research confirms what practitioners observe daily. Gesture and joint attention predict later language outcomes (Colonnesi et al., 2010), and rich multimodal caregiver input (e.g. touch, tone, gaze, etc.) supports semantic development before a child speaks their first full sentence (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2014). For children acquiring two languages, the relationship between gesture and context often bridges gaps in their vocabularies, and this allows for fluid and strategic communication across linguistic domains (De Anda & Friend, 2020). However, theory and research alone don't quite capture the quiet genius of a toddler who can only communicate without uttering a word. I’ve seen children with only a few spoken words (usually repeating what teachers say to them) coordinate elaborate games with their peers using only looks and hand gestures. The implication is simple but quite profound: meaning precedes language and isn’t necessarily “born” with it. Meaning emerges in the shared space in the child’s relationship with their caregivers, peers, and objects in their surroundings. Language refines and formalizes what preverbal communication already establishes in shared minds.

For educators, this means treating gestures and glances as part of a child’s communicative toolkit as opposed to immature approximations of speech. For researchers, it means designing studies that don’t treat language as an “all-or-nothing” skill and rather as a layer built on top of rich embodied interaction. For families raising dual-language learners, it means trusting that understanding often outpaces expression, and that silence doesn’t mean absence of thought.

Working with two- and three-year-olds has reshaped how I think about language. It’s easy to think of it as a “switch” that “flips on” at around age three, with milestones of “first words”, “first sentences”, and “grammar rules” along the way. But in the preschool classroom, I learned to notice the moments in between. A toddler silently offers a toy to comfort a crying friend. Two children chase each other across the yard, not saying anything but clearly playing the same game. Meaning lives not just in what we say, but also in how we connect with and understand one another, and perhaps maybe language begins in the shared impulse to make ourselves known.

Works cited

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