Ming from Agents of Speech explains why counting "I want" phrases misses what matters: vocabulary diversity across nouns, adjectives, verbs, and locatives, plus grammatical complexity, predict a delayed child's language ability and therapy outcomes. Prognosis requires the full picture, not a summary.
If you have a lot of I want sentences, it doesn't predict a child's language performance or their ability. What we usually look for an assessment is that do they have a large amount of vocabulary in different categories, so nouns, adjectives, locatives, and then you also have verbs. Right. The more of these verbs or whatever, the higher the chance and the predictor that the child would do well in a language therapy setting. And that's what we call prognosis. Some parents will email me with this word that they've learned, and they will say, ming, what's the prognosis of my child given what I've summarized to you? I'm like, how would I know? I don't know. The language profile. So the language profile is a few things. The amount of vocab and also the language and or grammatical complexity that they have right now.
