Ming from Agents of Speech warns against using constant clapping and calling to get a delayed child's attention. Kids learn to respond to the prompt itself, not because interaction matters. Better: make activities genuinely interesting or become someone they want to look at without being prompted.
Sometimes parents will clap or like say, hey. To get a child's attention, if you do this all the time, it becomes contingent that they look at you only when you give an external cue, like a pet. Why is that bad? This is what we call artificial attention. Why this is bad is because if the attention is according to the prompt, then you will only get the attention when you provide the prompt, which is not good, right? If you're doing this, you're not solving the problem. The problem is that the child doesn't understand why you are interesting. Second, if they haven't understood that speaking or using speech is something important and getting it correct is very important, if they cannot differentiate between what's important, like you're rolling a car and they're supposed to look, but they don't find the car rolling fun or interesting, why would they look? Maybe the first thing you should do is to solve the play skill issues so that they find it interesting and therefore they will look. Or you must become someone interesting and then they will start looking.
