Ming at Agents of Speech explains what parents should do when their speech-delayed child speaks. Skip neutral responses like "okay" and don't overdo exaggerated praise. Instead, repeat what they said, praise them, and point to the real thing they're talking about to connect the sound to the object.
Sometimes when a child says something and they haven't done it in a while, what happens is that Chinese parents will go, okay, like that. Western parents will go, both of them. Are not language facilitating. If you just think that, oh, they're supposed to say a word, so you're like, okay, good, like that. What does that help your child with? Nothing, really. Because if you only acknowledge the fact that they talk and not praise them or repeat the sentence or the phrase, it's not going to help them facilitate more language growth. Actually makes the child feel like, whoa, what's going on? This kind of reaction does work for children who haven't learned how to imitate words or use words at all. And we only use it for like a very short period of time because it's what we call artificial attention. You say something woo, like that, whilst that's good, but at the same time that reaction is too much and it usually makes the child feel like, whoa, taken aback. So how do you make it facilitating is that you repeat the word one more time and if you can, you can point out to the stuff that they're referring to in the real world so that they make a link about the word, the sound and the thing, the concept, the object.
