A short YouTube talk by Ming @ Agents of Speech about strategies to promote expressive language in autistic children. The speaker emphasizes teaching complex eye gaze combined with vocalizations and gestures, creating routines to elicit communicative functions, and converting simpler communication attempts (tantrums, hand-leading) into more complex, meaningful acts to encourage speech development.
Autistic children what predicts the later expressive language abilities are how complex their eye gazing are they looking whilst vocalizing and doing a gesture. They're very communicative right then these are the things that we should train our children to do. And I know I said the word eye gaze, eye contact that triggers some people and say how my kid doesn't look at me. Don't think about that. Think about how to teach those language functions, create routines and then teach some gestures and vocalizations and then later on you can up it and request and wait for eye gaze. At the end of the day children, no matter if he or she is on the spectrum or not there are a lot of communication attempts whether it's in the form of tantrum, pulling your hand, hand leading and those are less complex. You need to be able to spot those and turn it into something that is more meaningful and more complex. So help them start talking.
