The Key to Verbal Imitation | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Alrighty, guys. Welcome everyone. I'm going live on YouTube, Facebook and also Instagram. Guys, if you're watching this, please let me know where you're watching from. Say hi, say hello, whatever, but I'm gonna go straight inside and talk about what we are gonna. Exactly. The topic is the key to verbal imitation. What's verbal imitation? Basically is if you tell your child to say something, they say it back, right? So this happens a lot when parents or therapists, teachers start to teach a child, they want to make a child being able to say a word after them, right? So this piece of skill is actually what we call a preverbal. Preverbal skill, sorry, pre linguistic skill. That's the word. So a pre linguistic skill is something that they need to be able to do it in order to be able to talk later on. Okay, so why is it important that a child is able to imitate you? Okay? It's because without imitation there's not much of a skill. Okay? And at the end of the day, all skills. As a supervisor used to tell me a long time ago, he would say that, he would say, at the end of the day, all skills are matching skills. And what are imitation skills? Actually it's like matching what you are doing, what you're saying to what they are saying. They're matching with sounds and the tone and so on. So you see a lot of children, if they are able to copy YouTube, like YouTube is the best teacher nowadays, as the parents would say, oh, they learned a lot from YouTube and you're learning a lot from YouTube because you're watching this. So. Hi guys. Hi, Nandi Nandani. Hi Carlton. What's up? And hi Gabby. And on ig, I see a lot of people too. Hi, guys. So anyways, the point about is this. You need to know how to make a child imitate, okay? And I see it far too many times that we put a lot of emphasize emphasis on imitation because we just want to hear the child speak, right? So how do we do it? Actually, first of all, you cannot start off with speech. And I've talked about this many, many times on agents of speech, on this YouTube channel, on wherever. Okay? So why we don't start off with verbal imitation in the beginning is because it's difficult, right? It's difficult. It's difficult for the child to speak the word, speak the sound. If it were easy, they've been already doing it. So for instance, here Nandani says, my child is talking, but how can I add more language? He imitates a Lot. So when children start to imitate, you can't stop them from imitating. Don't worry, Nandani, I will answer your question later on. I just need to talk about today's topic, which is imitation. And this whole topic today, it started off with one of the parents from our group who told us showed a video of how the child was not imitating anything. Right? So you need to start off with non verbal imitation. What is non verbal imitation? Guys, it's just basically just doing actions. Okay? So there's two different. Give you some tactics here. Okay, Give you some tactics. But at the end of the day, tactics can only bring you so far. What we need is strategies at home. Your, your general, your child's general willingness to, to copy you, to listen to you, to play with you, and so on, so forth. All right, so let's talk about what is non verbal reason. Sorry, non. Non verbal imitation. So start off with easy, easy, easy actions. So for instance, clapping hands. You know, a lot of kindergartens, they will start off and talk about, oh, doing nursery rhymes, right? Like the wheels on the bus go round and round or whatever. Open and close, up and down, you know, these are all gestures. There's a reason why it's inside of the syllabus other than nowadays, you know, like in kindergarten. I think the syllabus is a little too difficult to my liking at least. I wouldn't want my kid to learn a for alligator. But anyways, that's besides the point, right? We're here to talk about imitation. So start with big, what we call gross motor. Gross motor means big, big motor. Okay, so we start with gross motors, gross motor skills. And you might say, hey, isn't that a little more of what we call occupational therapy stuff like sensory integration, whatever. Well, not really, because when we're teaching gross motor imitation, we're teaching not the skill, like how well they do it. Like, we're not focusing on how well they can do their hands. Like, like that, or, you know, open and close or up and down. None of that. What we want them to understand is that they're able to, they're able to imitate at least around what we're doing. Okay, so if we're teaching some gestures, as in pointing, right, clapping, tapping, head robbing, Tommy, all these, we're teaching them this. Then why we want to do this is because there might be actually a, it might be actually a meaning towards that gesture later on. Okay? So we need to teach the imitation skill first, not the content of, you know, how many, like, movements. Or whatever. We're not teaching dance moves. We're teaching the general understanding of imitation. Right. If you see me doing that, can the child follow me? Okay. And after these gross motives, which your child doesn't really need to look at you, they don't need to really look at you, they can just kind of look one second or half a second to know what to do. These are the easy tasks. So why do we start off with easy tasks for anyone teaching anyone anything? It's because whenever we're training something, we want it to be progressive. Progressive, right. So we always give this example. So let's say you want to learn to do a push up. Obviously you're going to fail every time if you do it with like 100% full form. Right. Going to 4. Sorry for using an exercise as an example. But the reason is because you always want to start for ladies here, for all the moms who are watching, we always start from putting our knees on the floor first and then maybe even elevate the knees so that it's easier to push. So it's the same for a kid. If they cannot talk, why would you start off with talking first? Because obviously you're setting them up to fail, right? So start off with some easier stuff. And what we talk about is gross motor imitation. And you hear it a lot within the ABA community, the ASD community. So for the, for people who don't know yet, ABA is Applied Behavioral Therapy and Applied Behavioral Analysis. Okay. And there are a lot of backlash on whether if it's like, effective or not. We're not here to talk about that. I'm actually very okay with aba, but anyways, what about like, like ASD and aba? Why do we do these imitations? First they think that like they, as in the Applied Behavioral Therapy, they think that, oh, imitation skills are a life skill. And to us speech therapists, imitation skill is a pre linguistic skill. All right, so after you do that, your child doesn't need to look at you. A lot of parents will start off with teaching eye contact. The first thing that they say from a DM on Instagram or a private message or email over on YouTube is like, they say, my kid can't even look at me. How do I expect them to do or speak or do anything? Right? So that is not the real point here. The real point is to teach the imitation, not to teach them to look. And how do you teach? It is basically very easy. If you have a goal, let's say that you have a toy that they know how to Play. Once they do action, they are able to continue to play with the thing they want. All right? And if that's too hard for you, and you cannot sit down with a child with a toy that they like to play. You don't know how to engage them, that's fine. Use a reward in the beginning, okay? Meaning you can use, I don't know, chips, biscuits, whatever. It's up to you. Okay? But they have to finish an action in order to get what they want. And obviously start off with small pieces first. Okay. So what do you do after? With gross motor, It's. We move slowly towards the mouth. And why we want to do that is because we want them to pay attention to how we talk in order for them to understand more about how to talk themselves. So first of all, the first thing about it is that when you're teaching imitation, help them finish. The reason why we do it is because for talking, if we want them to verbally imitate, we cannot put our hands inside of their mouth and move their tongue for your child. First of all, that's disgusting. Second of all, it doesn't work. That's why we start up with. When we're teaching imitation, we start with hands so that they can see it. I can take their hand and finish the action. What are some good imitation tasks that you can do? Like tapping a table? If you can see me tapping the table, because you can see it, you can hear it, and there's some. You can feel it if you put your hand on the table. All right. The other one is touching a head. Touching shoulders. Just one hand will do. Rubbing the tummy, stomping feet. All these are great. Why we want to do these is because we would use it in songs in kindergarten. During kindergarten, too, Right? Like head, shoulders, knees and toes. Right. Don't go down to the toe because it's very hard to prompt. Okay? So those are the gross motors. So. So later on, we want to go through the fine motor, okay? So someone says, here, sorry, my cat's in the way. So, hi. Hi, Monica. Nice to see you. Hi, Mia. We'll talk about the conversation part later on after we finish about imitation. All right? So someone says. Kip says he won't care when I tap the table or touching the head, etc. And that's because you don't have a strong routine or you don't have a reward system going on. Okay? It's if you have a song, that's a routine. Head children, he's into that. That's a routine. But if you don't have something that you can lean on, for example, like a toy that they like to play or whatever, then you should use a reward. Okay? Just use it, use it. Okay. Some people say it's bribing. Some people say it's not natural. Yes, of course it's not natural in the beginning, right? You're disrupting the natural way of, of communicating, which is hand pulling. Right? Their natural way is to pull your hand, is to cry, is to, to scream or whatever, or I don't know, just vocalize like, ah, like that. That's their natural way. If you present something that is outside of their, of their ability and what they're, they're okay with, then of course you're gonna do something unnatural, right? Which is giving them a reward to do something you want them to do, or else there's nothing in for them. All right? Okay. So all this stuff you can go to agents of speech.com micro. I have better lessons there. Instead of me trying to teach you through live. Right. So I was talking about gross motor. Now we go to fine motor. What's fine motor? So fine motor I'm not going to deal with like the occupational therapy side, which is like using little fingers or, or writing or whatever. What we're trying to do here is that for fine motor, we're trying to get them to look at the mouth, trying to make them follow something around the mouth. So obviously the first thing is can they touch the mouth, can they touch the nose, can they touch the face, can they touch ears? So we're slowly moving towards here so that later on we can do some mouth shape imitation and slowly transit into verbal imitation. Okay. So the logic here is that from easy to hard, from easy to hard, from nonsense to make sense, using, using speech, right? So after you touch table or tap head, whatever, that's cool. Can they touch their nose? Yes. Can they touch their mouth? Yes. Can they go like that? Yes. Can they like do that? Yes, all these can. And then afterwards you want to go on to mouth shapes. So mouth shapes is a good one because they have to look at your mouth, right? They have to start looking. Doesn't matter if they're not looking at your face or looking into your eyes like I am right now. So why we want to do that is because when they look at our mouths and then we have their attention, we know how well they can actually move the mouths and accordingly to what we ask them to do. So you see a lot of nonverbal children, not like, I mean most non Verbal children, if you bring them to a speech therapist, right? Or bring them to whatever developmental, pediatric or whatever, a lot of the times the word apraxia or dyspraxia or apraxia of speech will pop out. And that's why more and more people are asking me about that. Okay? I am learning more about this subject. There are a few true experts in this field that know a lot about apraxia speech, but at the. At this time, and I wouldn't want to talk about what it is. But if you're able to make a child copy and imitate your mouth Shakespeare, then that is already a very good sign that you're able to make a better diagnosis later on, whether it's with a therapist or whatnot. So once you get them to look at your mouth, and then when you say something, then you know that you have their attention. And so when you give them a verbal imitation, start with something very easy, like a vowel. Start with ah, start with E, start with U, E, and ah. Okay? Especially if you're watching in Southeast Asia, these five or even Japanese, right? These five vowels are basically all the vowels there are. All right, so if we're. I'm speaking in English, right? English, there are more vowels than that. But those are the most basic vowels that you can try. And when you try those, you can. You can see how well they actually can produce vowels. Okay? So that aside, that's how you get to verbal imitation. After you do vowels, it's very easy to transit into a single syllable word. Okay? It's super easy. But the whole work of teaching them the concept of imitation is difficult. Going from big to small to micro small, like moving the mouth and to talk is hard. All right, so if you follow this, it's gonna work because we've taught a lot of parents to do this, to start from zero to now speaking in sentences and whatnot. And that starts from imitation. If your child cannot imitate you, it's very hard for you to actually teach anything. Okay, so let's talk about more about your question. So please let me know if you have any questions. I know it's very difficult for me to answer anything from ig, but please do let me know if you have any questions there. And I'm going to look here first. All right, so let's see. Okay, so Nandani says, how can I add more language? He imitates a lot. So every time I hear imitates a lot is because children get stuck in three phases. And I'll talk about this in the next slide about the three phases that children get stuck all the time in if their language delayed. Okay. All right, so first of all is the imitation, like the non verbal phase. They don't know what is imitation yet. They don't know what's going on. They might have some words coming out out of nowhere. Right? But at the same time, it's very difficult, very difficult for the child to actually imitate a sound or a word. They might suddenly sing a nullaby or suddenly sing something, but that doesn't really mean they can imitate correctly. All right, so that non verbal phase and then the next phase is the imitation phase is where Nandani is stuck at. Okay, so for the imitation part, once they can't imitate, they will keep on imitating because when someone doesn't know what's happening, they will try to imitate a lot. Okay, so that means your child doesn't, probably doesn't understand a lot of the words that you're saying. And she's trying to imitate everything. Okay. And it's actually good that they're imitating because if your child's imitating you all the time, they're trying to learn what you're trying to say. They have an actual, they have a, they have a routine. They have a habit of imitating you. And that's why it's good, because they're trying to learn whatever they're trying to learn the sounds, the words and everything inside of your language. All right, so how do you add more language? Basically, first is that, how are you prompting your child to speak in the first place? All right, a lot of times when you talk, you have like, you have agenda, you have, you're leading by questions, you're prompting them a lot. Are you asking a lot of questions instead, are you describing and modeling what kind of language that you want the child to produce? For example, if you're always asking, what's this? What's that? Where is this? Who is this? What do you do now? What do you say now? Whatever, like that. Then what does the child do if he doesn't understand it? He's going to repeat your questions. Yeah. And if he doesn't understand your. The question, he repeats it. And then you give the answer right away he's going to imitate your answer. So it becomes like a routine. It keeps on going. So what you need to do now is that is to talk as if you don't want them to reply you and then teach them what you're trying to, what you want them to Model. All right, I've got more examples and agents of Speech.com micro. The micro course would be a good starting point for everyone but Nandani. I think for now what you need to do is to teach him to talk. Like, you need to provide a lot more language models and at the same time add a lot more gestures. All right, the problem with imitating is that it's a good tool in the beginning, but you need to fade it out, right? You need to make that child be able to speak to you when you gesture something. When you gesture something, when they talk, then you've gone past the imitation because now they got the meaning out of your what you want them to say and added the sound to it. So right now it's only sound to sound. You don't even know if he actually understands a lot of stuff. Right? Okay, so Mia. Oh, shalom. Hello from Israel. Nice. So she, Mia, has a five year old daughter. Excellent. Label things, but no conversation, same thing. So when, when children are stuck at imitation and labeling things, how you get them to the next level is to teach a lot of play routines, okay? Teach them a lot of play routines so that they're able to actually use the language in real life. In real life, a lot of times when they're labeling things, they are learning from the iPad, learning from videos, learning from you. Because sometimes parents or, you know, anyone will just keep on asking, what's that? What's this? What's that? They keep on asking, okay? So what you need to do now is basically teach them. Teach your child, teach her to play with toys together and then give some scripting towards how they would do it because she's good at labeling. So maybe if you play, you pretend that you're going to a restaurant, you already have scripts for her to say, oh, what do you want to order? So on, so forth, and then have a script where you say something, she says something, she just memorizes it and then slowly that becomes the content for her conversation later. And obviously in the beginning it feels like it's pretty robotic. But all learning is like that. Remember back then when we're learning our languages, our whatever. I mean, I learned English, English literature from like Shakespeare and whatnot. Isn't that very robotic? Everyone learns the same thing, right? So let's keep on going. If I haven't answered your question, please let me know again. Okay? All right. So Monica says, my son has tried to imitate my mouth, but doesn't make sounds. How can I make him say it? Say it instead of Produce. Say it and produce the sound. Oh, okay. So I think the problem here is that he's not making the sound right. And it really comes with time, Monica, Because a lot of times we have to keep on trying until the sound comes out. Okay. Another way is that you can use. You can start with blowing. You know, you can start with blowing. I start off with blowing sometimes is that I use a tissue paper and I tell them to blow like that, and then I try to transit it into the H sound. Like, if that doesn't work as a whistle, try out that a sound comes out. At least he knows that he's making a sound instead of just trying to do a mouse shape. But the problem about, like, using whistles or, like, horns or whatever they call talk tools, right? Talk tools are great. I'm not trying to bash them. I like them. It's good tools. So when you. When you blow on it, instantly, you have to teach what you want to teach in terms of speech. So after you blow like that. Right. The next step is to directly tell them to imitate an ah. So, ah see if they can continue that air flow and make them talk. The problem about, like, a mouth shape versus a sound imitation, like an ah, is that there's air coming out and pushing our vocal folds to flap, and therefore, there's sound. Right. So using a horn will promote that. And hopefully, fingers crossed, he will learn. Okay, so you can try that, Monica. All right. Nandani says thank you. He has started asking why, what, and where questions. That's great. Good for you. Very nice. It means that he's on the way to becoming better and better at language. That's good. Hi. Okay. All right. Someone says on Facebook, I'm sure it's from the group. I'm trying very hard to teach my son to play, but he refused to follow the steps, and he would grab the toys and play on his own. What can I do? Okay, the thing is, you have to control the toys. Okay. If. When you go to speech therapist, does this happen? No, it doesn't. Why? Because the. The toy is yours, and they need to know that. So how do you do it? Is, let's say, what type of toys that you have. You need a. For instance, if you're teaching with a doll. Like a doll, and you have, like, tools and toys that you can play with the doll, like with. What's that called? Pacifier. Like a milk bottle, whatever you. You need to really hold it and give it one by one to him. Okay. If he doesn't want to Want to follow steps, then he can do whatever he wants, right? But he only gets to play with the toy he wants with you, the fun toy with you. Otherwise, if he leaves the seat, that's fine. Don't need to chase them, whatever. Just play by yourself with the toy. And then when they see, oh, my God, it's so fun, I want to come back. And then they will start to think, okay, maybe I should listen to mom or dad. I don't know who. What gender you are. I'm so sorry. Okay, so, Nandani. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right, so someone from Facebook says, hi, Ming, I've been watching a micro lessons. They've been very educational for me, even though I've not completed watching them. My question is, how about the child who occasionally imitates? How do we know if it's an issue of ability of will? Hey, that's a great question, man. So the. Thanks for joining the microcourse and watching through it. It means a lot for me because then I don't need to keep on repeating and repeating. And for parents who want to check it out, it's agents of Speech.com micro. Okay. The link should be in the description box. If you're watching on. On Instagram, it should be on my. On my profile, I guess. Yeah. So anyways, so how do you know if it. If a child, when they imitate, if you know if it's a issue of ability or will. So basically, you have to be very, very ruthless about your rewarding. And what I mean by ruthless is that if a child. I remember a child coming to me, right? They've been through therapy for like a whole year, and that kid still hasn't been talking, not even been able to copy anything, Right? So the problem is now that we don't know whether it's ability or a will. As we always say in ancient speech, it's either they don't know how to or they. They don't want to. Right? It's always these two, two big. These two big reasons about why someone wouldn't do something. Either they won't or they, you know, they can't. Right? So first of all, be ruthless about your rewards. The. The child I was talking about, when he came over, I asked the mom, what's his favorite thing? Number one thing, he cannot take his hands off. Right? And that thing is the iPhone with a specific game inside. Okay. And the dad and the mom didn't really want me to use it as a reward in the beginning, but I Said, hey, I got to know. I got to know if I can use that to get him to talk to me, right? So when you use your reward, you cannot. You cannot. And I say this in huge capital letters, you cannot just give them whatever, okay? So the issue about ability of will is that you use a. A grade reinforcer from the very first day, all right? Even if it means that breaking. I mean, I don't want to. I don't want your child to have. You know, if they're lactose intolerant, then obviously don't use it. If they have a problem with like gluten problems, like after they eat it, they get rashes, they get hyper excited, then don't. But sometimes you have to use the most unhealthy snack to push them to let you see if it's a will or ability. So if I'm holding chips, like the favorite chips, for instance, in Indonesia here, there's something called chitaro, right? If you know, then you know it's really good. It's like cocaine level kind of chip. So if I'm holding it and the person who's asking this question, right, if the child is trying to snatch it from me, and they've learned that they have to imitate in order to get something from me, as we were talking in the micro course, that the first thing is that we need to teach them the open palm. Can they do that? Yes. Then that's already fine. Because ability and will both can, right? So if they still. They want it so bad and they're trying their best to do it and they're still trying to snatch it, then the will part is already covered. You need to use the best reward to see if it's the case or not. All right? You need to understand that if it's a. A will problem, then use the best reward. There's no whatever. All that matters, all that's left is the ability. All right? So. So I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. Okay? Do not try to skimp on rewards. Even if it means that it's unhealthy in the short run. Okay. Even if it means a lot of parents will say, I don't like using toys or whatever, I don't like using iPhone, iPad. It's bad for the eyes. Yeah. Which one is more important at this moment in time? Is it their shortsightedness or their ability to show you what they have? Show them what they have in terms of their language and speech skills. All right? And same goes to using food, right? It's not that we're going to use chips forever, okay? And back in the day, and just a funny story, back in the day when I was working as a. I was having a placement, an intern at. What's that called? A mentally retarded school. And that's how they call it. Okay, I don't mean to mean to insult anyone. That's the term for it, okay? And nowadays they call it intellectual disorder. Yeah, that's what they call it now. And back then, a lot of the staff there just know me by Mr. Potato Chips. Because I use potato chips a lot. I use it a lot. And. And all the kids love me. And that's because I'm like Santa Claus. Because they don't get to eat that kind of stuff. And that's why they work well with me and that's why they like me. And later on, I don't. I didn't even need to use the potato chips anymore at the end of the internship, but I had to leave. So start off with the best thing ever. You can. You can provide for them. And just to cover the will part. And the only thing left is ability. Great stuff. Okay, so Monica says thank you for answering my question. You're very welcome. We'll include more blowing to our activity. He doesn't know yet how to blow. Maybe that's why. Maybe, maybe not. But blowing is. Whenever you're trying to teach something from, let's say, talking, right? Imitation, you always need to have a middle step, right? That's why I'm telling you to do like gross motor imitation, fine motor imitation, and then mouth shape and then speech, right? So you see that there is actually middle steps for everything, or else it'll be very difficult for anyone to learn anything in the world. All right, good stuff. So if you guys have any questions, just let me know. At this point in time, I think I've covered what I wanted to talk about tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in from all channels. If you haven't really, go to agents of Speech.com micro, check out what we offer there. If you want to, then join. If you cannot, then every Monday we'll be going live on Facebook, YouTube, and now probably on Instagram as well to answer your questions and also talk about a topic that I want to talk about. Okay? There's no set. You can ask me anything. And if I think that more people can be benefited from me talking about it, I will talk about it in live. All right. All right, guys, so let me know what your questions are so that I can do these lives and help more of you. Help more of you guys. Okay, so. So that's probably it for tonight. Good night, everyone. Or good morning if you're in the USA and I don't know what time it is in Europe right now. And do let me know. Yeah. Hey, visa. As I said. Sorry. I'm gonna read it out just before I go. She says, no eye contact. No single word. Just using hand signal. Go through what we talk about here again, like, slide back and take a look. All right? If you need more help, get the micro course if you can. If not, then, you know, ask again. Inside of the, you know, we have a lot of. We have a lot of resources inside of the Facebook group on YouTube and so on. And now we're trying to go on insta a little more. And hopefully, you know, you can learn from other parents who have been there, done that, who've been able to do that. And I realized that the first thing you talk about is no eye contact. That shouldn't be your biggest goal in teaching a child. Eye contact is a means to an end. And we'll talk about that maybe next week. But we have videos about that, guys. We have videos about why no eye contact, why we don't like eye contact, why how to get from zero to single words. We all have all of these videos on. On YouTube. So all you need to do is to go to agents of speech on YouTube and just look at the videos there and watch it. All right, guys, so thank you for tuning in. And I will see you next Monday at the same time, 9pM Jakarta time. If you're in Malaysia, that'll be 10. If you're in New York, that'd be 10aM okay, so thanks, guys. See ya.