How to Prevent Speech Delay

Can we prevent speech delay? The answer is not really, but also yes. So in this video, I'll talk about some things as a speech therapist that I see actually help. And I'll also tell you some data from research that will help you understand what are the things that you can do today to help. Alright. My name is Ming from agentsofspeech.com we help parents teach their speech delay children at home. And a lot of parents will ask, what things can we do? Is it folic acid, Is it dha, Is it fish oil? Whatever supplements that a person can take in order to prevent speech delay, like during pregnancy, after birth, whatever. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about any of that. All right? Today was what I do is that I find behavioral things that we can do, things that we can actually perform in order to teach children. Right? So one of the things that we use to prevent further language delay or during when a baby is still developing language is sign language. I'm sure you've heard of this many times that pediatricians, doctors, therapists, teachers, we all recommend baby signing. Now, there are a subgroup of people, parents especially, who would think, oh, if I teach my child how to sign, would they actually like signing more than talk? The answer is probably not. And I haven't seen this at all. Because sign language by itself will not. It isn't a very effective way of communicating. First of all, you have to look at me. Second of all, in order to sign a full sentence. I would have said three sentences by that time. It's not that effective. The most effective way of communication is talking. That's why you're watching this video right now and I'm talking to you instead of you reading a blog post. Now, there are some people who would much rather read, right? But at the same time, in real life, we cannot type. There aren't subtitles coming down at the bottom of this video like the one that you're watching right now. Right? Sign language is a good preventative thing that you can teach your child. And there is a lot of research to support that. Why? Right? Well, language, now that there's AI all over, and how AI learned language is actually modeled from how humans us learned language, right? So there's something called a semantic map. And these words are crazy and it probably won't mean anything to you. But in child development there's something called fast mapping. And what it does is we have a word here, we have another word here, and we map the words that are similar in meaning and Meaning is semantic. Right. If they're closer together, we'll map it closer together. Right. And in language, Right. When there's spoken language and there's just the idea of language, for instance, I can read something, doesn't mean I can say it properly. So when you. I'm going to go a little further now, but I'll come back to make this whole story and analogy work for you. Don't worry. So when we're dealing with a dyslexic child, especially in English, we will have to deal with three things. Number one, how does it look like? Right. In written word, how does it sound like? And then the meaning, so it forms a triangle. And I'm using a gesture here, as you can see. So the link between the grapheme, which is how it's written out, and the meaning, is the link intact? Right. And then from the meaning to the sound of the, of the spoken word, is it intact? Right. And then from the written to the sound, is it intact? So dyslexic children have a problem from written to the sound, so they cannot really read it phonetically. Right. And this will be different from language to language. Most languages in the world are phonemic, meaning it's written, how it's spoken. Chinese, I'm Chinese, Chinese, we don't have that a lot of the times. Dyslexia is much harder to treat in Chinese than in something like Japan. Japanese or Arabic or Indonesian or English. Right. English is a little bit more tough because there are actually three languages that constitute towards how it sounds like. So it's French, Greek and Latin, if you're interested. So how does it tie back to gestures? So the biggest problem when the child is developing language is that there is a bad linkage in between the meaning to the sound, the meaning to the sound. So that's why you see a lot of children, they can repeat after you, but doesn't mean they can use it. The sound doesn't constitute towards the meaning. You see a lot of parenting and children who are on the spectrum especially, they cannot make this link. And they think that this word or this repetition of a word gives them anything. So I want whatever or that they're copying you all that doesn't have a true meaning and it's not mapped correctly. So going back to fast mapping, semantic mapping is that, can I map this sound, this word in my brain to a particular meaning? How do we do it without the sound? And that is gestures, because we cannot write in the air. Right. That's why you will see a lot of autistic children being able to have the link between the grapheme, which is the written word to the sound. But that doesn't mean they understand what it is. They can recite ABCs, they can say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They can recite the planet names, animal names, but doesn't mean that they understand the meaning. And that is why a lot of therapy, when we teach names of animals, we include the animal sounds like moo, meow, wolf, whatever, because it has semantic meaning towards it. So that's why when you go to a therapy center, when a therapist is talking to your child, there's a lot of language feedback that's semantic based, right. Coming back to all of this, right? And I want to give you some, some antidotes here, right? The first thing is I had a, I had a parent who was stuck and she was in our parent coaching for nonverbal children and we got her child to speaking in words, but he was parroting a lot. And when he joined, he was eight and now he's eight and a half or something. He's finally using words correctly. But he had a lot of semantic errors, meaning he would say things that are very similar in meaning. So for instance, he would get fork into a knife and also a chair with a table. He would mix it up things that are close in terms of the semantic maps. So it's kind of I getting the stuff wrong because that's how they learn as well. They create a map, a 3D map through math and then they link the words with probability. And that's pretty, pretty similar to how children and us develop language, right? So the cueing method that the mother was shooting for was using a sound. So if he was doing like say a knife instead of a spoon and she wanted to prompt the word spoon, she would go, right. But then the S adding an S, we call it a phonemic cue, right? Just the first sound of a word that actually triggers not the meaning part, but the sound part, right? So then the highest frequency meaning, the most probable word that starts with a S is not spoon, right? So what happens is that she wanted him to say spoon, but by adding the s, what happened was that the child would say snake, which is out of context. And so you see this very small thing, right? This very small thing, just to let you know, using sign language can prevent and enhance a child's language acquisition. The reason is being if a child is on the spectrum or whatever, right? And I haven't gone to the other, the other disorders, right? Having a gesture that you can fall back to as. As a language cue prompt. Right? What that does is that instead of going, we go like this as a scooping motion, then there's a higher probability that the child can actually say the word spoon instead of knife in that situation. Right. And I'm sure if you have any clients or your child is. Is like that, if you give the first sound the brain triggers and it goes through the highest frequency, the highest likelihood, the highest probability in terms of their mapping, if it's done by sounds, it's going to trigger them and get them to say a word that is totally out of context. So having gestures, right. It means it will strengthen the link between the meaning to the sound because there's now a middle step, which is a gesture. All right, so there are some study I'm going to link some below is that some German teachers were using iconic gestures to teach mathematics. And shapes were so easily understood as a gesture cue, they would understand. This is a triangle. Sorry, this is a rectangle. This is a triangle. This is a circle. Like, it's iconic. It's easy to understand. It gives a middle step in between the sound and the meaning. And a lot of autistic children, they have this problem of remembering rules based on the sounds, right? So, and I want to tell you, there's a high comorbidity meaning autistic people, they have other problems. So a lot of them actually have some sort of a hearing loss as well. So you might be saying, ming, dude, sign language only for deaf people or deaf children or people with hearing loss aids, hearing problems, whatever. That is not entirely true because if we don't know, a lot of times I made a video like a week ago or whatever that, like, hearing problems, like hearing loss is the biggest reason for speech and language delay. A lot of times it goes undetected because it seems like they can function and stuff, but. And they can hear some. But there are some sounds or some words they cannot readily identify. So having some sort of a gesture will prevent the language delay and deficit that comes with hearing loss that flies under the radar. So if you start doing baby signing, you start using gestures and stuff early on, it can help to reduce the risk of having a language delay because of a hearing loss. All right? So it's the best you can do to prevent. And it also helps later on for you to like to have a solid process prompting mechanism to teach your child to speak in not only single words, but in sentences. Because when a child is stuck in a sentence, like now I'll Be helping some other therapists with their cases. They showed me a Down syndrome case where the child would stop in between words when making a sentence. So what can we do in this particular case, especially when she, the client could not read? And we can't use words and cues, obviously we can use gestures, right? So we can use the gestures to gesture out the sentence first fluently, and then we link the gestures to the words so that we can prompt them. Right. The essence of therapy is always to find a proper, good prompting mechanism that we can use over and over and over and over again, and then we can fade it out and later on they can say things spontaneously themselves. All right, so at the end of the day, what kind of gestures do we need? So we need iconic ones. So what does iconic mean? So a lot of parents go to therapy and the first gesture that therapy does is this one, right? You and I know this is more. If you've. If this is not your first rodeo in the speech therapy or therapy world, this more thing doesn't really help a lot, you know, because this is like a get out of jail card for everything. Like you can say more for everything. But we want iconic ones, especially ones that are with verbs, right? Because every sentence, especially in English, right. If you know a little bit of linguistics, I'm not a linguist, I'm just telling you a huge chunk of a sentence is a verb phrase meaning. The meaning of a word is dictated by what verb we use. All right? And so if we don't have a lot of verbs, what's going to happen is we're going to stuck with nouns. And that's why a lot of children who are stuck at single word level, they have loads of nouns by them, no verbs. So then you need to use gestures to help them expand that verb base. Because like when you do flashcards, you can't do verb flashcards because it doesn't make sense, right? The best you can do is use a video or act it out. But at the same time, you still need a middle ground because you cannot always show a video, you cannot always act out something. So you need a gesture that is symbolic, like this, that everyone knows around the world. This is drink, right? No matter what cultural background you do this or you do this, everyone knows you're thirsty, you're hungry, whatever. So teach that to your child to prevent them from going to a route where they just rely on a singular gesture. Using nouns, using wrong words, wrong phrases, like when they fall down, as are you. Like they say, are you okay for you because you're modeling that. But instead you can add gestures like ah, like that to indicate that it's in pain to prompt them to say the correct thing. That's it for this video. I've gone very long about why gestures are very important. Why it can be a preventative measure towards speech and language delay and is the most important thing there is. You have to use it properly and use a huge variety of it. All right. And that's it for this video. Thank you for tuning in. By the way, Please go to www.agentsofspeech.com Course There are free courses on how to teach what gestures like how to prompt if your child is non verbal, how do we teach gestures if your child is verbal, how do we use gestures to make longer sentences and so on and go there. It's a huge community of 13,000 parents. Inside we have free courses. You can ask questions where our coaches myself are inside. We'll try our best to answer your questions there. That's it for this video. Thank you for tuning in. See ya.