My Toddler Understands But Isn’t Talking - Tips from Speech Therapist

Is your toddler understanding everything you say but just wouldn't talk? In this video, I'll tell you exactly the steps that a speech therapist would go through when a child like that comes through our door. So my name is Ming, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com we help parents to teach their children to talk at home. Okay, so the first point is understanding what compensation strategies are. So this is a mouthful, but what it means is that when we don't understand something, we tend to use everything around us to guess. So it could be, if you're in a foreign country, it could be someone's facial expression, it could be what their eyes are looking at. It could be the gestures that they use, the context of which. So let me give you an example. So if I were in Japan and I wanted to ask someone if I could park at a certain place and they were like doing this. No, Then obviously it means even if I didn't understand that, I would know, okay, I'm not supposed to park here. Or if somebody hands me a piece of rubbish in Japan, that means I'm supposed to throw it for them, right? Or they put their hand out. When I have a piece of rubbish, it means that I can give the rubbish to them. And it's similar to children. When parents tell me, oh, my child understands everything, they get it, okay? And then they send me a video or I see them in real life. What happens is that there's a lot of pointing involved. So what happens is go get the shoes. Put on your shoes now. Right? Give me the remote. Right? And then what happens is that the child just needs to follow the finger if there's, oh, no, Ming, my child understands this. Look, give this to daddy, right? That's obvious. I could not understand English. You could speak in Spanish, you could speak in, I don't know, Portuguese. You give me a phone and you point to someone. I'm going to take it and give it to the person you were pointing at. So you wouldn't even know this if you did. You didn't even see yourself in a third person kind of view. So the best way to know if you're doing this or not is to actually take videos of yourself interacting with your child. Okay? Another thing, a contextual cue. So if I have a scrunched up piece of tissue here, if I give it to a child, what do you think he or she would do? And it's obvious that they're going to throw it in the bin because they see this as rubbish as a context, right? So if it's time at 8pm, let's say, and it's shower time, you turn on the faucet chalk and hears it like that, and it's getting steamy and you say, go take a shower. Do you think a child is going to understand that whether or not the words are like, involved is not comprehended at all? I think so. I think a child would be able to do that. Okay, so those are some contexts that you need to understand, you're using right now that children, your child is using as a strategy to compensate for the lack of understanding. Okay. And another thing that the huge marker for me is that if they understand everything, why aren't they answering questions of simple yes or no would be like either the child picks it or just walks off. Does that mean they understand yes or no? Probably not. Okay, if you give them between two choices and you ask do you want chocolate or chip? And they choose by using their hand, do you think that they understood the binary question? Binary means yes or no, only two choices. So do you think they understood that? Well, if they snatch both, then they probably didn't. Right. You have to understand there is a difference from comprehending and using compensation as a way to get around. Okay. Number two is you can use this logic to check for understanding. And if you've been to therapy, you know that command comprehension is actually a thing, is a goal. And how we do it is basically we want to remove any kind of context that a child can understand from within. So for the command needs to be something that is out the world that you wouldn't be able to understand too much. So for instance, if you had two dolls, let's say two dolls, and you want to give them, pretend that you're doing like a picnic scenario and you want to give them something each. So you have. And the key word here is a contrast, right? So if I have two dolls, one's called Mickey, one calls Donald, I don't know what you're going to use. And then you have some utensils, so you might have a fork, knife and a spoon and you say, give the knife to Mickey. So picks up the knife and gives Mickey. A huge error that a lot of parents and teachers go into is to hand the knife, and this is the phone, hand the knife to the child and say, give the knife to Mickey. So automatically, because you were handing a knife, you have already eliminated one choice out of their comprehension. Because I didn't need to know whether it's a knife, a phone, or whatever you hand it to Me, I take it all I needed to comprehend was Mickey. So I'll give it to Mickey. And to add on to that, if you're going to point to the doll, you've eliminated all auditory comprehension, meaning they don't need to listen at all. And so you need to create a scenario where it's fun. Do a command, right, where there are contrasts between two people, two places and an object to check if they totally understand. Okay. And that might be really hard to set up, especially as if you don't have a working relationship with your child. For full context about how to do this in a structured way, you can go to agents of Speech.com course. We have videos and courses about how to exactly do this. It's inside of a course called Zero to words. So you can check right there and how we set it up. And there are video examples from other parents as well. Okay. That aside, how else can you check for understanding without having to set up the whole thing? For example, a very quick check is I would give this scrunched out tissue to a child and say, put this on the chair, put this on the sofa, or put this on a sofa. If your child doesn't give you a funny look and just throw it in the bin. Probably they weren't listening and you would argue. No, they just didn't listen to me, that's all. It doesn't mean they didn't comprehend, right? So you can do this with everything, right? You can tell them at the doorstep when they're supposed to put on their shoes. You can tell them and there's a choice between gloves and shoes or socks. I don't know what kind of climate you guys are in right now. So like you can give them a choice and tell them the thing they're supposed to put on, right? If they're. And you can hold them back a little bit and say, put on your hat. And then see if they understand that. And that's only what one, one word, the one keyword they needed to understand was either hat, shoe or sock. And then through that you will see does he truly understand or does he do whatever he wants? So knowing that, we come down to the third point, which is knowing the breakdown level at this point in time is very difficult to know. And the only way. And I'll talk about what a breakdown level is. A child will only. And a person or a cat just now, they won't do something because of two reasons only. Number one, they don't know how to do it. Number two, they don't want To, Right. So to eliminate the fact that children don't want to do something, usually speaking in the beginning of all therapy, we kind of use rewards. And it could be like screen time. It could be snacks, food or whatever, but you want to pay the person you're trying to teach, the pet you're trying to teach an incentive so that he or she knows that there's something in it for them. Okay. So the breakdown level, on the other hand, is the other question, right? Do they know how to do it? So there's a limit. There's an upper threshold to how much a person can understand in a certain language. So for me and you right now are English level is at conversational, right? But probably you and I were stuck at the academic level, which is if we're trying to read an academic paper, we break down. I was, what the heck's going on? I don't know what's. I don't understand this English. I know every word, but put together, I don't know what's going on. So that's our breakdown level. Our breakdown level is conversational story level. I can understand a story. I can understand the movie. You give me an academic paper, I don't know what's going on. And same as for children, right? What is their breakdown level? Then there would be a breakdown level for their comprehension and the expressive, like receptive and expressive. So if you're not new to the therapy world as receptive and expressive language, I'm not going to get into that. It just means how much to understand and how much they can speak. So since we're talking about comprehension, we need to know what the breakdown levels are. So the first one, the first level of comprehension is contextual commands. So if I put out a chair in front of a child and say, sit, are they going to sit on the chair, given that I've gestured, and then put a chair right in front of them? Right. That's a contextual command. I could say anything. I could say bubbles, and they would still sit. That's a contextual command. Right. The second level of comprehension would be single words. So just like just now, if I told the child to take give me the hat, right? And you might think, give me that hat. That's like forward. But do I need to understand. Give me the. To understand the word? Most probably not, because there's only one keyword, which is the object. So single word commands can stretch from a single word to a phrase. Okay. So after that, it would be like two pieces of information or critical elements. If you want to get technical. But usually speaking, we use this to gauge how many keywords a child can absorb in a certain sentence. If I say put, put the shoes inside the microwave, the keywords are shoe and microwave, Right? So obviously you can argue if you have contrast where you can put it on top of the microwave, then that would be three. But then we don't really care here as long as we're checking for how many keywords a child can actually understand. Okay. And this is the main point. If you're checking for how many keywords, your child needs to have those keywords as vocabulary. A lot of parents and teachers and also some therapists, I see what they do is like they check a command of which some of the words aren't inside of the child's vocabulary. And you cannot do two things in one go. You cannot teach the word and teach the command at the same time. It's just impossible. Anyone will break down at that level. Okay. And for comprehension level after two, we would start to just say, oh, can they understand the sentence? Because the key words and the meaningful words vary from context to context, right? So we're not going to count some therapists. And this is me in the beginning, too. I would count to four. And that was crazy because then we're actually treating a child's memory more than the language comprehension, right? So then at this point in time, after two pieces of info, keywords, whatever you like to call it, we tend to go into sentences like sentence comprehension. After that, it would be answering questions like who where questions. Those questions need to be very contextually based. So for example, who would be like, who's wearing glasses? And it would be Ming, right? And it would be like, where is. I don't know, there's pretty white in the background. So like, where's the cat on top of the table. So those are the responses we're looking for when a child is, so to speak, understanding who and where questions. Okay? So after that, we want to do questions within a context, right? So you know, who, where, what questions from me describing something. It's like a single event, and I would like a very, very simple story. And after that, we want to do some why questions. And those are already at the realm of verbal reasoning. And we're not going to get into that rabbit hole in this video. Okay. The last thing I want to talk about is teaching the command and question comprehension that I've talked about. So easiest way is to give a very structured approach, right? So a lot of times we can use books. We can use books that have velcro stickers that we can change the person that is doing something or change the place that they're somewhere in order to ask the question so they can't memorize that thing. And then the commands as well. All we got to do is just sit them down and have something that is contextually fair. Like for instance if we make tea party game or that we are doing play, pretend that everyone's going to like a PE lesson with dolls and whatnot. Or we can make up a very simple story and we would teach the child some commands about what they should be doing. For example, distributing the utensils. Right. Getting people ready, the dolls ready to line up. Right. And these make believe pretend play embedded with command. Comprehension is very good. And I know you guys would say I want to see this in real life. I want to see you do it. We do have some of those inside of our free community, which is agents of Speech.com course. There are some demonstrations there. But I just want to tell you it's really difficult to get parents to say yes to to me showing videos. It's the best way that you do it. And then you can send it to us later on right inside of the community and then we can have a look there. That's much easier than you trying to learn from a different child. And the best way to learn for you is to do it. And then you get feedback specifically for your situation and your child only. Okay, that's all I'm going to talk about in this video. If you need more help, just go to agents of Speech.com course, ask a question there, join our community, fill in the three questions and then ask a question. Actually, you know what? You should search before you ask a question because there are 15,000 parents inside. And then if someone must have asked something similar to yours, so search it first, see if the courses have it, the community has it, and then ask a question. Okay, that's it for now. If you enjoyed this video, you will like the next one here. Thank you. See ya.