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Body language, including facial expression, accompanies most human speech to gain effective communication. It supports speech, helping to clarify meaning and making it more accessible to the listener. Only when you speak to someone who cuts out facial expression and gestures do you realise the important role that both play in conveying meaning. Some people find them so much a part of speech that they even use them while talking on the telephone!

Babies have an innate drive to communicate and socialise and in so doing satisfy their powerful desire to find out about their world. They learn language more easily when the person with whom they are having a dialogue uses 'parentese' or infant- directed speech ('First Words', Nursery World, 1 April). Exaggerated and dramatised body language is a natural part of parentese. Babies acquire it and begin to use it to communicate in the babbling stage, between six and 15 months, before they can say words. By three years most children's body language resembles that of adults who regularly hold dialogue with them. Bilingual children acquire the different forms of body language linked to their two languages and most, by the age of three, rarely seem to confuse them.