Speech therapists should teach play skills first, not force talking in nonverbal kids. Once children reach single words, teach play routines that pull out verbs and different word types so they can start combining words into sentences.
If you're not targeting play skills, then that's going to be a problem. Down the line. If you don't have enough context to communicate with your kid, and it's always to do with using rewards or trying to bribe, that's how you get stuck with like I want sentences later on. That's because you don't have enough play contexts to target more language down the line, so you have to build it up. During the nonverbal phase, your target shouldn't be to get your child to talk, is to get your child to play. After your child gets through non verbal phase, we go on to one to three word phrase level. We kind of like teach a play routine because most of the time from our case, children who cannot do word combining to make sentences or phrases is because they don't have enough vocab. And this is where parents will say, no, my kid knows like 150 words. They know all the planet names, animals or whatever. But the problem is, can you put two planet names together and make a sentence? You need different word classes, meaning you need places, adjectives and verbs. That's why in the one to three word phrase level we teach a lot more play and we try to teach verbs whilst we're doing the play.
