How To Teach Speech Delayed Children Longer Sentences

This is ming here from agentsofspeech.com today we're talking about how gestures can actually help your child to speak longer and actually learn words. Before we get onto this video, I just really want to thank everyone who is watching these videos at this moment in time of this recording, we have around 150 subscribers on our channel. And I'm very grateful for that. To think about it, it's kind of like a small lecture hall, and I'm really happy to be able to talk about these kind of things with you all without actually having a physical location. Do you come to a seminar and listen into this? And if you're listening to this as a parent, it means that you really want to improve the way that you are as a person to help your child in the best way. And I really, really appreciate it. Okay, let's get into the video right now and stay tuned. Okay, so I've been teaching using gestures as a way to expand language and to and for children to actually learn certain words. Okay. So if you think about speech delay children, what they are lacking in is actually the way in that they acquire words. So you always hear about speech therapists talk about, oh, how many words does your child have? If you've done that questionnaire in the beginning of a therapy session? And why we put so much emphasis on the number of words acquired is because children tend to combine words at the round when they hit, like, 150 words acquired in a certain language. But the thing is, there's different studies about it. I'm not gonna go into detail about this. Some say 150, some say north of 200 or something, but it doesn't matter. The thing is, we have to teach vocabs, okay? And how we do it is basically through gestures or something. And this is from my own clinical observation is that nouns are pretty easily learned by children. And the reason is there's. There's a deep library of videos on YouTube that does a very good job in teaching nouns and names of places, fruits, vegetables, you know, dinosaurs, whatever, to kids. Whereas there aren't a lot of verbs that they actually teach on videos. And if you think about it, if your child right now is stuck at, like, one word or, like, no words, yet the things that they know in the beginning are the nouns, because it's solid. You can see it and you know what it is. So let's say you see like a cup. Obviously, that's a cup because you can see and touch it. But verbs are a little more abstract. And why I want to talk about learning expanding vocab, especially in verbs, is because that's usually what you do when you mix the words together to form a sentence. You're not going to say two nouns together per se. Like you wouldn't say cup and book. That's not really communicating. You're just like telling them there's cup and book right there. Usually what the first things that according to milestones, of course, I'm going to link some milestones in the description is that the first sentences that we learn are actually like verb plus a noun or like adjective plus a noun, so and so forth. And you see that, you know, there's something always accompanying the noun. Okay. So it's my own personal observation that these are lacking. And even if they actually know those stuff, they don't know how to put it together. So I wanted to tell you what's in my mind and what I actually read as a therapist. I'm going to share with you a certain article here that I found on the Internet that's a little more or less academic that I can share with you guys. I'm just going to read a little bit and I'll show you on the screen as well.

So I wanted to share this article. This is actually a summary article of the main article, and it's called Hand Gestures Boost Spoken and Sign Language Learning. This article is actually written by Susan Golden Miro. I might be butchering the name. I'm so sorry. And she's actually a professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Psychology. And the extra I wanted to talk about was this one right here. And I'll read it out for you guys. Children who can hear use gesture along with speech to communicate as they acquire spoken language. She says those gesture plus word combinations precede and predict the acquisition of word combinations that convey the same notions. The findings make it clear that children have an understanding of these notions before they are able to express them in speech.

Gesture is something that children understand and it comes before speech because there's some meaning into it.

And to.

To talk about this right now, why I talk about meaning is because when you're learning a language, you always learn the link between the speech to the meaning, the speech to the meaning, the speech sound to the meaning. And what the meaning is, is the thing in the world that we understand, that we look at.

Okay.

And when we map that link is what we call mapping. When you see a huge explosion in the acquisition of word. And children, we call it fast mapping.

So I want to talk about the main article Which I show you the summary article. It's much more simple, but there is actually a section inside which is very, very important when you need to understand increasing sentence length with gestures. So let's not talk about the title. I know it's very intimidating and stuff, but anyways, it's right here. I'll also drop the link for this article if you would like to venture into it. So in this part, it says sentences, which is. Yay. We're talking about how to increase the length of a sentence when teaching a child who is speech delayed. So I'll read this part, just this part, and here. Okay, so I'm going to start now. But children do often combine their gestures with words, and they produce these gestures plus speech combinations well before they produce word plus word combinations. So what that means is that children will start to use gestures plus words well before they actually put two words together. So we have to help them by actually teaching them the gestures. Right. And children's earliest gestures plus speech combinations contain gestures that convey information that complements the information conveyed in speech. For example, now you gotta take a look at this example. Pointing at a ball, saying ball. Soon after, children begin to produce combinations in which gestures convey the information that is different from and supplements the information conveyed in the accompanying speech. For example, pointing at a ball while saying here to request the ball to be moved to a particular spot. What this means is that before your child gets onto two or three word combinations, your best bet is actually to teach gestures so that your child will understand the meaning of putting two things together. Okay, they're going to use gestures to actually help them start to combine two meanings together to help them to talk in longer, longer sentences. When you're using gestures to increase sentence length, what you need to do is to actually introduce a bunch of vocabulary so that they can map the words towards the gestures and the meaning. And I want to say thank you to my clients right here. The mom is actually trying her best to do therapy whilst they cannot come to me. And a little backstory. This boy over here, he cannot really do three word sentences, yet he's kind of stuck at like one to two words. And what we're doing right now is to introduce play sequences to make him understand the sequence and the context and how to use this kind of language in this play so that it makes sense. So check this out. That was a really good trial. As you can see, the mother actually used the gesture cue to cue all the speech. The kid was looking at the mom for hints, and he got it he got to say the whole three words in a sentence. Good job. Fair, open, window, sit down. Good job. And similarly, it's still the same. He was looking for cues from the mom and the mother gave the cue for sitting. Obviously, we have to teach the child how to use the gestures in the beginning and what it actually means. And then we can use it as a cue to increase the sentence length. So it makes sense for this child to say and comment on it, because he's actually gone through this play sequence without the language first. And now he understands that when he says it, he gets to do it. And mom says it one more time and does some sound effects sometimes and it's pretty fun. So he's actually motivated to do it and it has become a routine for him. And as a bonus, I want to show you guys this video, which I am super proud of, by the way. The child finally understands the gestures enough to use it by himself when this happens. Basically, it's very good because now he can self kill himself and his brain or he could act it out. So look at this. See, he cued the sitting gesture and he's able to do that. That means the next time he might be able to self cue himself and finish the sentence. So great job. And I really want to tell you guys that this isn't really far away from you guys. And you guys can actually use this at home and start making this all happen for yourself. And all you have to do. If your child is still at one word level, obviously use the gesture to make them talk one word at a time first. But if you're stuck at like one to two words, you can totally use gestures to help them out. Okay? So thank you so much. I hope this was helpful.

Thank you so much for checking out this video. If you want to check out the academic papers that I talked about, it'll be linked down below. If you have any comments, whether you disagree, agree, or have troubles implementing this stuff at home, please put them in the comments below and let me know. It also makes me to become a better therapist because, you know, it challenges my thought process and so on, so forth. And before you leave, I want to give you a gift, which is Frequently Asked Questions, all in video format. It's actually part of our online course. These videos will help you answer pretty much all the questions that I get the most as a speech therapist at my own private clinic. So head to www.agentsofspeech.com faq faq for frequently asked questions. There will be around eight videos that I've made pre recorded to answer those questions that you might have in mind. All right, so go check it out. Lastly, please like and subscribe. And remember, whenever you like and you comment, it helps the YouTube algorithm to tell YouTube to send these videos to more people like yourself, more parents who need this information at home right now. Okay? So thank you so much again. I'll see you in the next video real soon.

Bye.