The purpose of this article is to elucidate a development problem of nonverbal means of communication as a condition of reflection formation in communication in children with speech underdevelopment. A research technique to characterise nonverbal encoding and decoding of nonverbal means of communication has been offered by the authors. Experimental study of nonverbal encoding and decoding is carried out, and also the analysis of the obtained experimental data is provided. (C) 2016 The Authors Published by Elseiver Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.