Ming from Agents of Speech explains why therapists should build pre-linguistic skills like eye contact, joint attention, and turn-taking before teaching words. These foundational abilities prepare children for language, not the other way around.
We focus more on pre linguistic skills for children who haven't yet spoken what we call at the pre linguistic stage. So pre linguistic skills is basically a set of skills that are required for child to be ready top the theory is that want to deal with the roots like we want to make their skill set wide the foundation solid until we teach more stuff you might see in a lot of other therapies or aba the therapist starts to teach like using words making the words a longer sentence like for instance example they might teach I want cookie whereas in speech therapy you might see a lot more that they're building commun communication intent building a routine teaching them some pre linguistic skills and you might ask what are some examples of pre linguistic skills so some of them are like eye contact, joint attention, pointing, turn taking, imitation using some social gestures and signs some babbling symbolic sound play so all these things are pre linguistic skills that we all use and we teach which sometimes are overlooked.
