A short instructional YouTube video by Ming @ Agents of Speech offering practical techniques for engaging non-verbal children. The speaker emphasizes establishing a working relationship and using a stepwise, least-to-most prompting strategy: reduce difficulty, use gestures, then mouth shapes, then vowels, and finally words, paired with structured play and naturalistic language facilitation to elicit verbal attempts.
If your child doesn't understand you or doesn't have a working relationship with you, they're just going to ignore you and you're going to feel really bad because you never had a success at home. You never had the chance of listening to your child repeat after you. It's going to be more having something that your child wants, asking your child to say something, and if they don't say it, reduce the level of difficulty, like meaning. Maybe go down to only using gestures, right? If gestures are okay, maybe do mouth shapes. And Mao, she says okay, Then maybe do just a vowel, right? Then you can try a word. But it's always need bass first. And then we slowly move towards play. And it's not just play, it's structured play. And then we go into the naturalistic language facilitation stuff that we usually recommend.
