Why is Signing Important for Speech Delayed Children?

Why is signing important? Well, let's talk about what is actually impaired in a speech, delayed or disordered child. What language is basically, is that there's a word that relates to a concept, right? And the concept can be something that is concrete, that's an object or something that is like less concrete, like a feeling, a color, still kind of concrete. Something that you can see, right? An action, right? So you need to understand that it's a word that relates to something in the real world or feeling or whatever. And this link, this link here is basically what a child needs to learn, right? So what happens in a delayed child or a disorder child is that they don't have this link, right? So what do they do to get an object that they want? They hand pull, right? They scream. They put your hand on top of stuff, right? Use you as a tool. Use you. You're the way, right? But they don't understand that. And a lot of parents ask me, oh, why? Why does my child like to do that? And they don't talk because talking is hard, right? So when you talk about word, right, you have two things here. One is the word itself, which is. Let's say that the. How do we say this nicely? So the word itself, right? Just call it the word itself and then there's a sound, right? And then actually, like, if you study something like dyslexia, there's like a triangle, right? There's a sound form and then there's the meaning, right? So sorry about my handwriting. These three things. So the problem is that they don't really have the links between all these. And we're talking about, like, a spoken word, right? So they don't have the links. So how do we build a link? So we need a step in between to build it. And that, my friend, is gestures or signing. That's why it's important. The reason why it's important is because if making a sound is hard, we need to make a form that we can do. A link between the form to the meaning first, right? Form to meaning or concept, as we were talking about. So how do we make sure that the form gets like, to the concept? Like, we create a language form to a concept, we make it easier. We cannot prompt speech, right? No matter how much we say, say this, say this, say this, it never happens. But what can we do? We can take the child's hand and do the gesture for them, right? Whatever it is like more is the one that therapists love doing, right? So we can use gestures as a form to a concept, right? And when we're doing concepts, right, which one should we target? Should we target, like, more Again, like that, A very universal concept. Or should we do like objects or should we do actions? So people who have been on my channel for a long time, obviously we know it's this one, but why don't we do objects? Well, because you can point, right? They can hand lead. Why more? And again, they'll use it for everything. It's universal. And then basically you taught a different way to get everything instead, which is. Was hand leading from the very beginning. But if it's actions, the meaning is a lot more apparent, right? Let me do a thing. So for instance, if it's eating is like this, if you can see me at the bottom here, it's like eating is like this, right? Which is quite universal if you go anywhere. Like drinking is like this. Like open is like that. In fact, we teach a lot of, a lot of open, thanks to the senior therapist who taught me this. Right? So actions have a higher meaning. What we're teaching the link between. So the link between a form and a specific concept, right? So if we have one gesture for each of these verbs, right? Turn on, right? Eat, drink, sleep, how easy is it for us to now have these different words that the child knows how to do? And it's within their vocabulary already, right? And you're going to say, I don't understand. We're trying to teach words, speech, not gestures. So let's go back to the triangle here. Right? Let me just find that. Ah, just find that here. So sorry for making this so ugly. Let me just draw that again. So you have form, right? Concept. Let's call it concept now. Sorry for changing name so often. And then you have sound. So you, you need to build the links one by one. Now that you have a link like this, right? Now they have your link like this. And then what you're trying to do is to bridge it over and teach the sound on top of the form. So if you associate the form, which is the gesture, to the sound, which might be eat many, many, many times, maybe 100 times, then this will be associated. The gesture to the sound will be associated. And therefore, because the form and the concept was already established, then this link will also be established too, right? That's some simple logic there. Hopefully you understand what I mean. So you're going to ask, right? A lot of parents do ask this. Wait a minute. Then wouldn't the child use the gesture every time? Well, the lucky thing is that the reason why you're Listening to me talk is because making a sound is faster than the gesture, right? It's faster. It's a lot faster. So if it's faster, then we use a gesture to cue speech, right? The word cue here is the best thing ever. Because when you do it right, the child has two options. Number one, copy you. Number two, once the link is established, right. Say the word instead. Right? Which one is faster? Obviously, number two. So that's why we want to use the gestures as a bridge, right? And that's why using gesture to cue a speech is good. So let's talk about the word cue for a bit. Cues and prompts. There are some people out there who says cues and prompts suck. Well, they kind of do if you don't know what you're doing. So what are cues and prompts? Cues and prompts are something that needs to be faded out. You cannot have someone always prompting your kid to say something that is unnatural. Unnatural, Right. You. It's unnatural to bring a dictionary out when you're learning a new language, when you're talking to someone else that needs to be faded out, right? It's unnatural to have an interpreter with you all the time if you're trying to learn a language. So you have to remember all cues and prompts is to be faded out. That's the most important thing. Most people, they use a prompt and they never fade it out. They never do it. It becomes prompt. Let me just put it here. This is what some of the people are saying. Online prompt dependence. Another word for it is, you know, like verbal contingency. So if you prompt a child, especially those who are on a, on a spectrum, if you use verb verbal to cue them, which will become say something, right? And this say becomes a contingency. It's contingent. They will only talk when they hear say, which some extent that's a conditioning, which is not cool. All right, so what can we do instead? We use gestures again. Haha. Why? Because we can reduce. Now think about, can we reduce these with, with verbal inputs, reduce intensity. So when you're thinking about a cue, let's think about what can you reduce. The most important thing is to reduce the intensity, right? Intensity is something that you can scale down. So let's say if it's a verbal prompt, you always have say you cannot reduce the word, say you can reduce it. So like that. But that's meaningless, right? Whereas if you reduce a gesture, you can reduce the speed, you can reduce the range, you can reduce it to such a slight touch. So I don't have a nice word for this, right? You can just move a little bit to prompt it. These are the things that you're looking for. Like you want to be able to reduce a prompt. And that's why gestures are very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very important. So let me go, go back all the way to the top, right? What we're trying to teach is always the word to the concept. And how we do that usually is that we force the kid to listen to the sound and get to the concept. Right? Listen to the sound and get to the concept. That's not going to work because if a link needs to be 1:1, it cannot be 10 to 1. That's very hard for someone to grasp the meaning and the link. Whereas the gesture, you help the child do the gesture and it goes to the concept. So it's one to one. Don't do it more than one time because that's not going to help. It's always needs to be one to one. So hopefully this answers some of the questions about, like, gestures, why it's good, Should I even sign? So on the correct answer is like, yes. And I can only say it's correct because I've been teaching that to a lot of parents over the Internet and it's been working. Right? So if you look at some of the stories and some of the testimonials we have, it's all about teaching gestures. Hopefully this was helpful. And if you haven't, please go to agents of speech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that will help you start home therapy. All right, so that's it. See ya. Bye. Bye.