Speech Therapist Answers Most Frequently Asked Questions on the Internet

Please join me in welcoming Ming Fung. Ming is the founder and CEO of Angels of Speech, an incredible platform dedicated to empowering parents of speech delayed children to find the support and the guidance they really need. He's transformed the lives of hundreds of families across Asia and America, helping kids with the most challenging speech delays, including non verbal cases, and help them make real breakthroughs. After over a decade of experience working in private clinics and schools, Ming released something. He realized something huge. Parent education is really more powerful than any clinic work. And that's when he decided to turn his entire focus to online education, helping parents achieve results with their child's speech that they never thought it's really possible. What truly sets him apart is his relentless drive to build lasting change hand in hand with parents. I'm really happy to have you here with us today, Ming. Welcome.

Thank you, Spela. It means a lot. That was a really good introduction. I'll add nothing to that.

Thank you. Appreciate it. So let's first start with this. Why do you think there's so much confusion around when kids should hit this milestone around speech delays, especially if they're on the spectrum?

Sure. The first thing is you have to understand a milestone is going to be different in different countries because Americans are the people who are making a lot of these milestones for their own country. But in other places where speech and language pathology isn't a huge place where they would put their academic money into. So therefore the milestones will vary and we will start using other countries milestones as a thing to do it. The second point is that milestones is supposed to be a symptom. So a lot of times we have to see all the milestones together to get a good picture of the child. And the milestones are for a purpose of whether they are delayed or not. It's a binary decision. Especially if they're on a spectrum, there's a huge chance that they're delayed already. The biggest problem is that parents, and sometimes teachers, therapists, professionals, they would zoom into particular milestones. And milestones shouldn't be isolated. They should be used to see as a whole and to make a educated guesstimate around what is the language age or where their speech is at, at what level. So when you say, oh, should they hit these milestones? It's just a symptom. You might have a cough, but it doesn't mean that, oh, we should cure the cough. There's just like underlying deficits, underlying problems, so to speak, that we need to look into in order for them to hit the milestone. So this is where the confusion comes in because sometimes parents like to. I'm not saying this, I'm saying this with love. Right. It's very easy to zoom in on specific areas that serve a narrative. Right. They don't have good eye contact, they have not good eye gaze. Right. They don't have drawn attention. Therefore I need to solve it and hit that milestone. So just does that answer your question? So there's a few facets to it. There's milestones all over the place. People use different ones all over the world, different cultures, different languages. And at the same time people are using it in a way as a. It's not an assessment tool anymore, but something to serve a narrative and to zoom in on particular ones that hasn't been developed yet.

And there's, I believe there's quite a few parents in our community with kids over 2 years old who aren't really talking yet. Instead, the kids just make sounds, but they don't seem to expand their vocabulary. Do you think this could sometimes be a speech or developmental delay and nothing more serious? And when really should parents start to worry or be worried that it might be something more complex like speech apraxia, for example, Instance.

Okay, first of all, speech apraxia and there's a lot of different speech disorders out there and we will never know. And I'll talk about this to answer this a little later, but I just want to highlight on the word practice of speech or childhood. These terms are used a lot on the Internet just to tell you the statistics, like 1% of the whole population of that we know of, that we've tested is apraxic, just 1%. And out of all the speech and language delayed children, including autistic children, is only 7%. So the chances are very low, just to let you know. But if you're saying, oh, there are two year old children who aren't really talking and are just making sounds, the first thing is in order to further assess, to further know, there must be some prerequisites. Can they actually do, can they actually imitate sounds? Because if we can't get a child to imitate after us, is pretty hard to get a hold on what they can do in terms of speech. So there are two facts. When we're teaching, no matter if you're doing whatever therapy, like an early intervention, ABA speech therapy, you're either doing a speech or language, right? So when you say that, oh, they don't seem to expand the vocab, that's a language side. So then we'll look more into playing. Right. Parent child interaction techniques. But we're talking about speech. Right. It's just impossible to know. Sometimes at two years old, we need to get them to at least two and a half, three, get them to repeat and do some, like, speech assessment in order to know if it's something more complex, as you were saying. Such as? Like a practice of speech dysarthria. A lot of really scary names out there, but we won't know until then.

So you suggest to wait later on. What would that age be when it's crucial?

Yeah. So it's not really an age, but it's getting them to at least be able to imitate sounds and words on command and under instruction, and they're able to sit with you for 30 minutes to an hour and then we will be able to know more. Or else it's just like you're trying to tell them to say something, they're not responding and you won't have a good picture of their speech profile.

Got it. And what about kids who have a big vocabulary and can speak in full sentences but are really hard to understand? Do you think it's something they might grow out of it, or are there some practical ways to help them clear up their speech?

For sure, if we're just talking about children on the spectrum, since this summit is about asd, a lot of ASD children do have what we call a comorbid situation, meaning they might have other things going on. And when you say that someone's speech is hard to understand, that's more of a speech issue. So the question is, are they going to be able to grow out of it? It's going to be, as I was saying, if you hit the prerequisites of being able to imitate speech, do a bunch of assessments and stuff about their speech ability, then we will know what kind of issue it is. Is it a sensory issue? Is it a motor issue? And these are usually what we call disordered. Right. So it's asd. Right. Autism Spectrum Disorder. Why is it called? Disorder is because the development doesn't go in the particular order that we know of. So when it's disordered, there's a high probability, and I'm just saying is that children usually will have a difficulty growing out of it because there are underlying problems. Whereas if it's just a delay, then most probably there should be an age where to become a lot more aware of the sounds and they're able to go out of it. But then when we're speaking about Autistic children, it's a fairly high chance that we would need to intervene and there would be a lower chance that they'd be able to do it, grow out of it themselves because they don't have the awareness, especially if there's like a sensory motor component towards it, which is a high probability with autistic children. And you were saying like practical help weights.

Right, sorry, what would be those?

So again you need to know the root cause of it. So if it's a sensory motor thing, then we need to deal with the sensory motor first before we even get to the speech. Some practical ways. And I hope, I wish that I could just tell parents, oh, just do A, B, C and D and they'll be fine. For speech in terms of language we can say that that's easier. But for speech wise, like getting, like correcting mispronunciations, getting them to have clearer speech, you really need to know the underlying problem. My practical way, which is not very helpful, is to go see a speech pathologist if you can, within the area, get an articulation assessment done so at least you know what sounds there aren't their repertoire. And then we can go ahead and think about what sounds to target and.

How to help them work from there. What about nonverbal kids? If they're like four or five and still not talking, should parents then be really worried? We hear all kinds of stories like the kid didn't talk, didn't say a word for years and then start speaking in full sentences. What's your advice to parents of nonverbal kids?

Right, So I can talk about this for a whole hour. But then the first thing is about like risks mitigate is it's risky because a lot of times what we call late talkers or some people might say, oh, there's a book about Einstein syndrome. Right. Einstein didn't talk until he was five or six. Some people are saying, oh, Einstein is on the spectrum as well. A lot of geniuses are like that. They're just not verbal or now the term is like non speaking adults who are still functional. And it's about whether you should worry. I think at this point in time, yes, because like you, you want to reduce the risk. Right. So if you haven't done any type of like intervention or therapy, you should be doing it by now, hopefully. And my, my advice is that you need to look into two things. Number one, how is their receptive language? Are they able to understand you? Receptive just means how much they can understand. Right. Let's say if you tell them, you tell your child to do something, can they follow a command? Can they understand instructions? Can they answer your questions without speaking? The probability of them being able to speak full sentences would be much higher later on because they already know the language, they just not necessarily want to do it. And it might be like a social issue more than anything. And the other thing to look out for is communication intent. How, especially for autistic individuals, do they actually have intention to want to communicate with you? If they have a low intention, then it might not be actually a language problem. They're non verbal by choice. Right. They don't want to have an interaction with you. So you look into these two things and see whether if it's a ability problem or just that they don't want to do it. Most of the time is a mixture of both. And so what you got to do now is to increase the intention for your child to want to talk to you. We've had a girl who is 12 on the spectrum, she was speaking, but it was only like two or three word phrases. So what happened was like every time the mom came over, she would say, mommy, go upstairs. She didn't want to talk to her, like very low intention. But then her receptive language was pretty good. So she would understand a lot of stuff. The first thing we had to do was of course go in and teach the child to like want to play with the parent. And I have another story as well that's really short. So basically child's non speaking and then. But she could type on her phone on WhatsApp. So we use that as a therapy tool and asked her, why? Why don't you want to talk? And then she's like, I don't see a point. I can talk to you on text. So you have to align what you want, what the child wants. If it's not aligned, then you have to find a thing that will pull them into your world. Right. Which is easier said than done. But most of the time, children on the spectrum, they do have things that they really like. So then you have to find those and try to make it into a communication thing so that you can enjoy your time together.

Brilliant. And when it comes to reversing speech delay, you say that parents should take on a coach role. Right. So what are some practical ways that parents can coach their kids? Like for instance, how should these sessions look like, how often should they do them and how long? And maybe also, why would you say that this approach consistently gets results?

Sure. So I'll start off with the practical ways, like how these sessions should look like is that because parents aren't trained therapists. And a lot of things, sometimes if you go. Not sometimes, but most of the stuff you see online about speech therapy for autistic children nowadays is very vanilla. For instance, follow the child's lead, listen to them, get down to the level, don't ask so many questions. Those are all really good suggestions. But if you're doing such a naturalistic approach with a person who is on the spectrum, if you're not skilled enough and you don't, you're not quick on your feet, you don't know what to say, what to describe, how to follow the lead and bring things into, onto the table so that you can get the interest and sell a toy without being salesy, which are all like therapy things that we have to learn when we just started. So the session should look very simple. There should only be one goal. Because a lot of times I see parent coaching with other therapists. Why it's, it's, it works with our company, Agents of Speech is because we only focus on one goal, right? A lot of parent coaching out there, there might be a whole stack of goals on in the file and they have to write it back and then they have to scan it and have a zoom call like what we're doing right now and discuss through it. But then what should be one goal? That is something that pushes a lot of dominoes. So we were talking about milestones, right? So in speech therapy, in the therapy world, we don't target milestones. We target a skill that will target a bunch of things that will help the child achieve the milestone, right? So we choose one thing that might be the lead domino, right? For instance, when we're talking about speech imitation, that's a really good goal to shoot for, right? Answering who aware questions, that's a really good goal to shoot for, right? Getting a child to understand how to do a play routine is a very good goal to shoot for. When the session should look like, we do one thing and it should be 15 to 20 minutes at a time. And then we get a child to sit with you because we don't want them to be going all around the house. That requires a lot of skill. If you ever had a therapist come to your house, you will see that they're all over the place doing a lot of language goals here and there, but you won't have the knowledge to observe and write down what they're doing. But the structure is for the parent, not for the child. So to speak. All right, so how often it should be daily, 15 to 20 minutes. And why this approach constantly gets results is because you only have an hour or two a week in terms of speech therapy or even ABA therapy or other types of therapy. You might get it, like, multiply multiple times a week. But at home, it's. Anytime is going to be a chance, an opportunity for therapy. And plus, that's daily life for them. If you take someone into a very special occasion, right. They're going to perform better just because they're at that location, if you understand what I'm saying. Because the therapists have designed the clinic room so that children will comply, so that it's not sensory stimulating for autistic individuals, so that, like, they don't bump their heads on the wall because of, like, soft pads and stuff. So that's not really a very naturalistic environment, especially for children who are on the spectrum. They cannot generalize skills. As in, this is new. I can't do this. But then once you're in the clinic room, everything is. They're pampered. So then it's easy to get results that way. But if you teach parents the skills, they can use it everywhere, and it will help. Children on the spectrum are not to use their skills all around the house, all around the neighborhood, around the supermarket, whatever.

It's brilliant. I know a lot of parents are involved 24, 7, and this must be really draining. That's why they maybe might prefer therapy, thinking they don't have the energy to do it or the knowledge to do it. How would you encourage them to give it a go themselves?

Yeah, for sure. So that's a really good question, and I just want to say it here. Therapy and parent work is not mutually exclusive, meaning it needs to happen together. Especially if you already have a therapy thing going on and it's working, it's even more important to bring it back home so that your child can use the same techniques, the behavioral tactics, the strategies, the therapy goals back at home. Or else you will have a child who only talks in the clinic room, which is not ideal, obviously. And then, like, parents, because I'll just tell you a story, right? When I first started doing the coaching model was because of COVID right? And I told a parent, hey, let's start off, like just 20 minutes a day, just doing this goal. And she went ahead and did three hours of the same thing. And it's the opposite of what you're saying. She's, like, super into it, and she really wants to make it work. But the problem is that she drained herself, she drained the child and she focused on the quantity because she saw it working and she wanted to milk it 100%. So the key here is the quality of the interaction, not the quantity. Right. And there's research talk about this all the time. Like if children in a language rich environment will do a lot better in terms of like language development. So the language rich is quality first, not the quantity. Because if you give a bunch of, you keep on saying things that are too hard, too difficult or like in a bombarding manner, it's not going to help the child because it becomes background noise and they start ignoring it. So what I would say parents to give it a go is that think about how to be effective. It's not about how much you do something, is how you do that. Because there must be someone on the Internet in the world who has done the same thing that you wanted to do, including teaching a child to talk. So from our data, from our knowledge, teaching parents is that 15 to 20 minutes is more than enough every day as long as it's really high quality.

So it's better to be consistent, have it on daily basis whether and to have two hours daily, right?

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

So for parents dealing with speech delays can be super frustrating and sometimes even scary. Trying to handle it themselves doesn't always work. And it can be tough to know that how to help without making even making it even worse. How would you advise parents to gradually step, step up the difficulty without adding to their kids frustration?

Yeah, so that's a great question again. So we have to think about it comes down to the parents understanding of the child. So there's a few aspects that we have to think about. When we're teaching a child to do anything, especially children on the spectrum, we have to do things gradually. Right. And as you were saying, how do we not add it to the frustration? As I was saying, a child or anyone, they don't want to do something because of two reasons. Right. Number one is that they don't want to do it. Number two is that they don't know how to do it. So if it's something that is within our reach to do, within my capability to do, right. I have no incentive to do so. Then I would also be frustrated. Why are you making me work overtime? But the other side is also true, right? If, if it's something I really want to do, but it's too hard, I would give up. And usually it's a mixture of both, as I was saying, Right. So how do you do it is you need to know what makes your child click. Right. What can motivate your child? If it's something that is in the ABA world, in the applied behavioral analysis world, it's a little frowned upon nowadays. But something that is useful is that you can grade what is a good activity or a reward or toy. That would make sense. Right. So you leave the hardest tasks with the highest type of reward. Right. That's number one. Number two is to know what your child's current language level is at. Right. So a parent who is, she actually lives in USA and then she was homeschooling her child for, I don't know, six years. But when I asked her what level of a language is your child? And she was like, oh, he's all over the place. He says sentences. Sometimes he says this. And I'm like, okay, so what's the breakdown level? Because that's a term that we use in the therapy world and because I thought, oh, she must have done so she's done thousands of dollars in terms of like parent education for herself. And then I told her, you don't know the breakdown level. No wonder he's frustrated when you're trying to get him to do really long things. Right. So you need to know what's the sentence length, right. What concepts he doesn't understand, what types of questions will make him stutter, will make him not know what to say. So it's a balance between the reward on the language level that you're shooting for. So therefore when you're trying to gradually step up without getting them to getting frustrated is number one, are you giving them enough incentive? And number two, is the task too easy or too hard? Most of the time it's going to be too hard. So you need to do both.

Nice. So when we talk about engaging kids with things like, with things they like. What if the kid loves watching, for instance, Ms. Rachel, is it? Yeah. Ms. Rachel, does that count as good practice with repetition and language or is there a reason we should keep screens out of this practice?

Yeah. So Ms. Rachel is great. The way that she interacts with children over a screen is at a masterclass level, I would say. But I would say it's still, I'm talking with you over a screen. I'm able to have a two way communication. But is Ms. Rachel able going to have a two way communication with the child? Probably not. So if your child likes to watch it, it's not so to speak, a good practice because then the use of the Language would be tied to the screen. And that's why a lot of our clients when they first came, they're like, oh, my child can sing. ABC can recite numbers, they know the planet names. When Ms. Rachel asked him to fill in the blank, they can do it over the screen, but in real life they can't. Right. Or it's really out of context. Especially for children on the spectrum, they would use the words in different, in the wrong contexts that us neurotypical people would think, ah, that's strange. I wouldn't say that at this situation there a need to keep the screen out of it. Yeah. I think there are situations where we must engage a child in something else in order for us to do something. Right. I'm not a parent yet, but I can see from my friends and like all over in the malls and whatever, like when whenever something happens or you have to run an errand or whatever, you need to engage your child, then okay, then you got to use a screen. But I would say try your best to use screens as a reward instead of something that is free or a distraction. So that's what I usually say and that's how we usually cut out the screen time with our clients. Right. And to use as a reward, they must say something, must do something in order to earn the right to have it. Yeah, brilliant.

Speaking of screens, there's a lot of confusion between virtual autism and classical autism among parents. How do these two compare and what are the differences when it comes to speech development?

Yeah, sure. Just, just telling you, virtual autism is an official term, yet as of right now we would still call it not a real term. And a lot of parents will get upset when, when those two are talked about with each other. I would say when you're comparing them to. Children will have autistic like symptoms for a lot of reasons. Like some people are saying, and it's not about saying, I see it myself. Right. If there's a lack of language rich environment, like language poor environment, a child will also have autistic like symptoms. If a child has hearing loss, which is a huge thing, like if your child has a glue year or what we call middle year infection, you can see autistic like features there as well. And same as a lot of other. I'm not going to go into it here. But then virtual autism in itself is just a language poor environment without enough social interaction. And then you can see autistic like features within the child. And I've seen it myself. All right. Nowadays everyone's holding a screen including us. Right. It's hard to take away a screen from a child if we're all using it. Right. Even now, everyone who's watching it, most probably 70%, are using a phone. Right. When you're comparing the differences between speech development, what we call classic just Autism spectrum disorder, as discussed in the DSM 5, speech development will have a lot more comorbidities, meaning that their speech will be a lot less clear. Right. There might be a lot more sensory issues going into it. Their play skills will be a lot more lacking and their social skills and everything is hindered. But if we're talking about virtual autism, I'm putting air quotes here just in case everyone's listening to this. It's. You will see that it's just more of the social aspect, the language use. Like, they would use words out of nowhere. Like I was saying, with mistratial stuff, you wouldn't necessarily see that they have. And if you remove the screen, most probably they would start to, like, suddenly change. That's what we see with our clients once we start to use the screens as a means of rewarding. And yeah, that. That would be it if it were real autism. If you take away the screen, the problem still persists.

Exactly. And what about the kids? For instance, there are some kids that can get really aggressive when they don't get their screen, iPad or TV or a game or something. And they might even have meltdowns if they're in use of the screen. How can parents break this cycle instead of just giving in and handing it over the phone or the game?

Oh, okay. So there's no silver bullet. There's no, like, magic pill for this. It takes a lot of work. If you go to our website, agentsofspeech.com, we have a lot of free courses and there's a whole community of parents there. As of right now, there are like 1200 people inside. Not 1200, 12,000. Sorry. So we've gone through this many times. The main issue is that your child, and I'm not saying this with a love, is that your child doesn't really respect you. Because in the clinic, like, if you send a child to a clinic, if the therapist uses the screen as a reward, once they take it away, are they going to throw a fit? Most probably not. Why? Because they know that they're going to have it back. They know they're going to get it back as long as there's certain conditions. And the other thing is, how long is the screen given to the child if it's given for free as a human right. Then they would think that, oh, why are you taking away my basic human right? I just share a story, right? One time I was in the airplane, there was free wi fi for everyone. And then suddenly I think five minutes after we took off, they would say, oh, wi fi is down. And everyone was complaining. And the wi fi was actually a. It was a privilege, not a right, but because it was given to them free, and it said that, oh, enjoy our complimentary wi fi. It's yada yada. And there was a promise behind it and people were using it already. And when it got cut off, people were offended. And it would happen to children all the same. And especially for children on the spectrum because they're rigid. You think that, oh, this is mine forever. How dare you take my phone? All these things will go inside of their minds and they get aggressive because there's no other way to get it. That's the main point. So if you think about why do we go protest? Because having a clear conversation and having a discussion is already out. The table is like using words, using communication isn't working. So I have to demonstrate my anger. So the same. I've talked to a autistic individual, a woman in her 30s. When we were working with her, she would get mad, she would headbutt people whenever, like, she didn't get her way. She knows it's wrong. But when we asked her after she calmed down, she was like, because I'm used to it, number one, since she was young. Number two is that she didn't see another way. And number three is that when she does that, usually what happens is that people give in, right? So it's not just about young children, right? Whether they're neurotypical or not. But when you say, like children on the spectrum, they're very rule based. So once you, you make the rule as such and you think that the phone is for free, it's very. It's a slippery slope. So instead, start putting tasks in the middle, right? Pause it, turn off, turn down the volume, make them do something, and then give it back to them.

Okay, thank you for sharing that. Now let's, let's move to the kids who tend to cover their ears or your mouth when you try to talk to them. I know this can be incredibly triggering for parents, but can you explain what might be going on in the kid's mind when they do that and what's the best way to handle that situation?

For sure. Usually there's only two reasons. Number one is that it's a sensory overload. Especially children on the spectrum, they might think it's too loud, annoying, too much for them. Number two, it might be a. It usually is a learned defensive way to get out of a situation. So it might start off as a sensory overload. Right. It started off a bad experience. They learned that if I cover his ears in that and run away or cover your mouth, then you will stop talking. So what's the best way to handle it is to go back and think about the two things that I was talking about. Is it that they don't want to do it or is it too hard? Right. If it's something that they don't want to do, make sure they're fairly compensated. They have a reward. They have something, an activity that's engaging to them. Right. And the second is that, are you talking too fast? Are you talking too much? Are you talking too loud? What is the language level that you're operating at as a too hard for him or her? In this instance, the best way to handle it is always when this happens. There's a sensory meltdown when they're covering the ears. Don't force your way into it. Show them something that is of value to them and then when they open up, and then you can try again.

Nice. You've mentioned ABA before. Since you've been working with more traditional practices such as Applied Behavior Analysis or aba, how do you think the parent coach approach compares to it for addressing these speech delays? Can you, for starters, explain how ABA actually works, what it focuses on, and if there are any areas it might actually miss?

Okay, so again, I can go on about this for a very long time because I started as an ABA therapist before I got my master's in speech therapy. I'm sure you might know this already. And the reason is, like, how ABA works is just like every type of therapy that we see in the world right now, that is behavior we do at a behavioral level, no matter if it's speech therapy, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, early intervention, we use the same principles and like how it works, basically, is that ABA is all about effective learning. Like, you find an incentive, a way to teach a client to do something, and that can be everything. And they may or may not be focusing on communication. So some clients will tell me, oh, in America, ABA is more about teaching them how to sort colors or whatever. That might be a cognitive task that occupational therapists would do more of. And AB is just once they find how to get a child on the spectrum to do the things that they want to do effectively. They will teach everything and anything under the sun. Right. So there really isn't too much of a focus. It's just about behaviors. Everything is a behavior. Whereas in speech therapy or like in our parent coaching, we try to target things that will help them the most with communication. And that's our job as speech therapists. So the areas that may miss is the speech part is that there isn't any analysis on the speech errors. So when you're asking about the practice of speech, ABA cannot address that because they do not have that knowledge shared with speech therapists. Which kind of sucks, to be honest, because children would be sitting the best and most compliant during ABA therapy. So that's actually a very good time to do speech tests. So they would miss those. And they would also miss doing parent child interaction things like how to talk to a child outside when they're not in the clinic, when you don't have rewards on your hand. Right. Then they also miss those. They also miss the way that how do we talk to a child? Right. How do we talk to them so that they feel not. You see, maybe a lot of times they use a lot of behavioral strategies that make it easy for the therapist and the child to follow. But then once there's no structure, everything falls apart. Right. Especially for children on the spectrum. So that's something that they miss. And I feel like more and more now as the focus in modern day therapy goes from structured towards more free play, more naturalistic and so on. ABA will need will miss on some of those parts, which gives it its effectiveness.

Brilliant. You often also mention something called Gestalt language processing, which for those who maybe don't know, is basically when kids learn language by memorizing whole phrases first and then move on to single words. Right.

Yes.

A lot of parents think kids with autism might learn better with phrases instead of just words. But what would you say? What does the research really say about that?

Yeah, so you've really done your homework. So good job about that. Like Gestalt language processing is a very hot term nowadays. There really is a lack of research. Actually it's like half. It's not really that much of a evidence based thing just yet. And some people would argue with me to death about this. And it was something that was like mentioned in a book in the 1980s by someone called Ann Peters and then a speech language pathologist scientist person called I'm going to butcher his name. I don't really remember how to say it. Barry present. He Made the stages, he made it into six stages of gestalt language processing. So the data tells us, the research tells us that like everyone learns language in two ways. And I've talked about this in some of the videos and the courses inside of our community, which you can just go to agentsofspeech.com to go check it out. Basically, gestalt just, it means the whole thing to some is more than the parts. That's what it means in psychology, in English terms. Not sure what it means in German, but anyways. So people will learn in a gestalt manner and analytical manner. Analytical means just Lego blocks. I learn subject, verb, object. I learned the verbs, I learned the nouns, adjectives, whatnot. And then as you were saying, gestalt just means learning whole chunks of phrases. Now, I don't know when it became a thing where we only do either, because in traditional speech therapy we do both. Especially for autistic people, because. And I'm getting quite passionate about this because everyone who is on the spectrum will need phrases that are functional to their everyday life in order to survive. And that's where the gestalt processing comes into place. And don't even talk about people on the spectrum, even us, if we go to a foreign country, there must be phrases where we must learn in order to survive. Right? If you're going there for travel even, right. I. If you go to Spain, you must know how to say how much even I know it. Quanta questa. Right? Just because I had to remember in a gestalt fashion. So we do both, we cannot do either or. And there are people who are saying that. Oh, because like autistic people, they learn well this way. That's why we have to teach them this way, which is right. But only for the functional things. Because as we go on, just imagine how many iterations of how the number of phrases we have to teach a person in order for them to become fluent in language. That's why autistic people will say things that are out of context because they're using a phrase that means the same thing in their mind for a certain use, right? So when they fall down, they say are you okay? Instead of I'm hurt. Because when they fall down, the mom will say, are you okay? And they learn that gestalt. So it needs to be both, it cannot be either or, right? It's an, It's a mix of gestalt. And so right now people are going into extremes to talk about, oh, it's neuro affirming to teach in gestalt manner. But we've always done so for the functional phrases. And so if you don't have those analytical ways of teaching a bunch of vocab, especially verbs, by the way, that they can use to create new sentences flexibly, then it's going to be a very long, very long, extremely long time in language therapy. Because as we were talking about, milestones and characteristics are symptoms. But that doesn't mean that we need a, if you have a headache, I'll give you a Panadol, a painkiller. That's not right. We need to see what's going on. So we teach them analytical things. We teach them what's a deficit and their vocab and their morphology, like syntax, sentence structures. And then they will develop better in terms of the language and then they'll hit the milestones and not because the milestones and their characteristics as such. And then we try to accommodate 100% because if we do that, we'll never get to where we want to go.

Okay, we need to move now to the rapid fire questions. As someone who knows really both sides, what's the biggest difference in how Eastern versus Western cultures do deal with speech delays? What would you say?

I think the biggest difference is the wait and see mentality. And a lot of western institutes, especially with the pediatricians, they would always say wait and see. But whereas in Asia and eastern parts of the world, it's always let's do therapy right away. So the huge difference is there. The second difference is one, the Western, like for instance, you were talking about aba. Right. Right now it's banned in New Zealand and it's not covered as insurance in Australia. So that's why I was saying the whole world of therapy is moving away from structured aba, even like old school speech therapy is getting replaced by more naturalistic, child centered, all these kind of approaches, which in the eastern world we're still using a lot of structure stuff. And in the Western world there's a lot more naturalistic approaches. Not saying which is better, just the differences.

Right?

Yeah.

What's one big myth that you would say about child speech development that you wish parents knew that it really wasn't true?

Yeah, we should never target eye contact and eye gaze. That's not something that we should shoot for in terms of speech development because a lot of parents will think, oh, that's the prerequisite I need to get them because the milestone says so. Right. Oh, that six months or nine months, they need to be like having joint attention with you. So I'm Focusing on joint attention or whatever. That's a misconception. That's not, that's a myth. I'm sure if you give your child a screen, they're going to look at it. So it's not a problem about attention and focus because they do watch videos. Right.

What was the most eye opening stat that you found on kids? Speech development? Would you say?

Yes? Sure. So since we're talking about autistic children in this talk, I'll talk about something more. ASD. So actually the majority, 74% of individuals with ASD, they have something else going on in terms of their speech, Right. This is a huge, a very big difference. If we're talking about neurotypical people, we usually only have one thing going on. The autistic clients that we have, a lot of them have other things like a speech disorder. Right. Sensory issues, have so on, so forth. It's eye opening because. And that's why the summit is important, because then you need to know how to deal with those comorbid things that are going on.

Exactly. And on a scale from 1 to 10, how much does a busy parent or family schedule affect kids speech?

To preface this, I'm gonna say if, if the child is predisposed to a language delay such as a person on the spectrum, then it must be an 8 at least. If not, if they're typical developing the neurotypical, then it's a six.

Great. And what's the one thing you'd tell worried parents to let them know that everything's going to be really all right with their kids? What would that be?

So don't worry about the diagnosis for now. Just don't. Whether you think it is autism or not, I know you're on the summit for a reason. You're looking into things, you want to learn more, which is all great. It's good stuff. The more you dig a hole. I was just talking to a parent today. She was trying to accept the fact that her child was on the spectrum. Her son is three and nine months now, non verbal still. And she was getting pretty upset because she spent the whole week diving into the rabbit hole and seeing like, how does this therapy work? So on and so forth. So don't worry about the diagnosis just yet because it will reveal itself when you start doing more therapy work. So start intervening right now. Start doing the stuff that you can do, control the things that you can control. Because when you start doing language therapy, whatever, therapy, whatever things that you learn from this conference, right. You will see how the child reacts and then you can make a better educated guess rather than going into a black hole. And the second point is that if your child is pre verbal level or like sentence, like just speaking in phrases, the language therapy is largely the same. It doesn't change much whether your child is on the spectrum or not. We're still building the same skills, doing the same things, going through the same routines, teaching play. So try not to. And I cannot say don't worry and you won't worry. Right? Think about, put your focus on intervening, doing the action, and it'll give you clarity.

Thank you so much. I think we've all learned so much just these 15 minutes. Thank you, Ming, so much for being here with us today and sharing your incredible knowledge. It means a world to us and I hope to see you and to host you again soon so we can dive even deeper into these amazing topics, which is really important. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Svela. Likewise. Thank you for having us. Having me.