Ming from Agents of Speech explains why establishing communication intent matters more than grammar in early speech therapy. Before teaching language form, therapists focus on building a child's desire to communicate through play, routines, gestures, and AAC devices.
What we speech therapists do is that we focus on communication intent. What it means is that how much does your child want to talk to you? I want to initiate some form of communication with you. And that's basically communication intent. And why we focus on that is because we don't really want to teach the form of language just yet. We want to get the root problem, which is do they even want to talk to us? We want to get them to start wanting to communicate first, whether it's using gestures, words, pictures or even using iPad like a communication device, what we call aac, to communicate with their communication partner which might be their dads, their moms or a therapist. This is very important that we go through communication intent. And most of the time in the beginning you see the therapist playing and building routines that's building towards teaching them to have the intention to communicate with us. That's the first point.
