Ming from Agents of Speech explains why verbal imitation matters for nonverbal children in speech therapy. It helps assess what a child can do physically and reveals whether speech delays are due to motor skills, hearing, or other factors.
The most important thing when you're dealing with non verbal children, when I'm teaching parents and I'm doing my therapy on my own is establishing verbal imitation. Because if I don't do verbal imitation, I will not know whether this whole thing is only language related or speech related. If I don't have verbal imitation down, I cannot go on assessing whether there's a speech disorder component to this. And we have to address it, which means there might be like some sounds that the child cannot produce. There are other therapists, like I'm not saying anyone is wrong as long as it's working for you. And basically like verbal imitation is also one of the pre linguistic skills that you should target. Anyways, what happens a lot is parents get sidetracked and think about, oh, I need to teach joint attention, I need to do eye contact, I need to do matching. All these things, they don't matter as much because it doesn't give you a plan of action. What you got to do now is to think about how you can teach verbal imitation to nonverbal children so you can think about why there was a nonverbal situation in the very first place.
