Ming from Agents of Speech breaks down why children communicate beyond just asking for things. Kids point, ask questions, answer, and say no. Speech therapists build on these functions first, before tackling vocabulary and grammar.
There are a lot more of why children communicate with us, not only for requesting, commenting, pointing at something and say, hey, mom, look, that's an airplane. There's asking questions. Fourth answering questions. The list goes on. You can have negation. So all these types of communication reasons is what we call pragmatics or language use. The difference between speech therapy and other types of therapy is that we take these into account. What's the function of the language that they're using right now so that they don't always get stuck and always requesting, always saying no or rejecting what you tell them to do? So you're building up on that so that they have different reasons to communicate with you, they have more intent to talk to you. And then afterwards, you can deal with the different vocabs, the structure and sentences and the grammar and so on. Right.
