How Much Will Your Autistic Child Speak?

What if we can predict how much autistic children will speak in the future? So there's a recent study that talks about pre linguistic communication and how we can see how it predicts expressive language in autistic children. So I'll put the link of the reference down below. You can read it yourself if you want to. But basically what this is talking about is if a child who is around like one to three, what we consider pre linguistic, that means not speaking yet, how do we find things to predict how well they will do in the future? And basically, to sum it up, it comes down to how complex the communication is with you. Okay? So the more frequent that child uses, like gestures, vocalizations and combinations together, and the reasons, and also how the gestures look like will actually predict how well they will speak. Because basically, the more complex their communication is with you, the better the results will be. So what does that tell us? Because if that's the case, then there's, you know, like all we do is observe a child and see how much they vocalize and talk to you and their complexity and their quality of communication with you despite them not being able to talk. Right? So what we need to do is, let's say it's very simple. If these things predict that children will speak more, then we do things that will promote the things that will help them get better results, right? So we know that using gestures and using vocalizations, we think like those things as a combination will help children get better results down the road, right? So therefore, if we promote these things, it will help them speak better. So how do we do it? Basically, these gestures and vocalizations, they have meaning, and meaning comes from play. So play is, is something that we always need to look into because it's also a predictor of cognitive ability of a child. So if you want your child to be smarter, quote, unquote, you should teach them how to play more. Okay, so if you think about, like we've talked about, what language functions are on this channel before. So if the more language functions you have, the more chances that your child will actually use more gestures and vocalizations and communicate with you, right? So what does that mean? The main communicative language function is to request. Some people call it manding, demanding, whatever, requesting. And if you only have this function, your child will only talk to you when he or she wants something. So you only have a singular point where your child actually wants to communicate. But what if there's commenting, right? There's greeting, there's, you know, like answering questions, right? Responding to their Name or whatever all these language functions you need to teach. And you teach this through different activities, different routines and play sequences. We have videos on play sequences and routines on this channel. You can go check it out. And something even better is like you can go to www.comcourse and then you can see the free courses that we've made that we used to sell. And there are loads of, like, routines and play stuff that you can learn over there, right? So once you have those, you create more language functions for a child. You increase the chance that your child will actually want to talk to you. And when, even if they have no words, maybe they'll do it in the form of gesture of which you can teach. Right? But you can only teach gesture if they understand the routine, which we talked about before. So if that's the case, then the gestures and also the sounds, the vocalizations, those things can only happen and only be taught when they have a very, very solid routine understanding it goes back to what we think before. Is that okay? If autistic children, what predicts the later expressive language abilities are how complex are their eye gazing, Right. Are they looking at you whilst. Whilst vocalizing and doing a gesture? They're very communicative. Right? Then these are the things that we should train our children to do. And I know I said the word eye gaze, eye contact that triggers some people and say, how my kid doesn't look at me. Don't think about that. Think about how to teach those language functions, create routines, and then teach some gestures and vocalizations. And then later on you can up it and request and wait for ig. And if you give more. And we have a definitive guide on teaching eye contact and when and why. And usually the answer is we don't teach. Right? But if you really want to check it out, it's also in our channel. So, like, search for I in our channel. Okay? So you have to understand at the end of the day that children, no matter if he or she is on the spectrum or not, there are a lot of communication attempts, whether it's in the form of tantrumming, pulling your hand, hand leading, whatever you call it. And those are less complex. It's not as complex. And therefore you need to know and be able to spot those and turn it into something that is more meaningful and more complex that. So I help them down the road when they start talking. All right, so all of these you can learn in ww.agentsofbeach.com course and you can go there, sign up, and learn about what's the routine and the structure of play that we talk about there. All right, so that's it for today's video. I hope to see you soon. Bye. Bye.