A short YouTube talk by Ming @ Agents of Speech (Oct 17, 2023) offering practical strategies for expanding children's functional language. Emphasizes introducing new contexts and language functions, using play and caregiver-led interest to encourage horizontal generalization (using phrases across contexts and functions) rather than only making utterances longer (vertical expansion).
Your focus shouldn't be what your child has as a disorder. They're functioning. They're processing language in chunks. But why? The reason why is because they don't have other language functions. Your language cannot go beyond what they want and what context to understand. Then you have to introduce new contexts and new language functions. How am I going to do that? Leading with play and nurturing interest. Remember, if you're teaching a child with teaching materials like cards, flashcards, then obviously the child's language function is only going to be commenting when they see certain pictures, which is good, but we need to expand those. I always tell parents teaching them longer sentences is going up this ver from going cookie to going, I want cookie to I want the red cookie. A lot of people are going up this vertical, but nobody is going horizontal. Meaning, can they say this in different contexts? Can they say this for different language functions? Can they say this in different environments to different people? This is called generalization. Whereas, like, the vertical is all about adding more words.
