Will Children Grow out of a Speech Delay?

All right, so recently a bunch of researchers has done something called using machine learning methods to identify early life predictors of 11 year language outcome. Now that sounds crazy. So this relates to whether your child will actually catch up or whether their current language skills extrapolated to 11 years of age. Are they going to be okay or not? Right. The link of this study is down below. You can read it yourself and like go through the nitty gritties. But what's actually good, what's actually useful is to look at the results here and to see the seven predictors about whether a child will still have low language at 11 years old or not. Well, that's a very binary thing, right? And if you read inside of here, it's, it's actually a pretty simple study. But what we want to look at are these things and these are actually things that we can intervene, right. We can actually teach. And as a parent, as a teacher or therapist, these are always very good to take a look at. All right, so the first thing is vocabulary, right. At 24 months, there are seven predictors. The first one is vocabulary within these categories, vocabulary as a whole. So if you're new here, you need to know that vocabulary itself, it's not just the size of it. There's loads of studies saying, oh, if a child hits like 150 words, 500 words, I don't know how many, like, it's always a different number. But if a child hits a certain number of vocab, it's natural for them to combine words. Right? That's fair enough. So if that's the case, right. Then how come children, who knows all the planet names and all the animal names, they're not combining words? Well, it depends on whether the child is actually functional with those words. Right. What's the language use, which is pragmatic over here? We'll talk about that in a little bit. Let me just zoom in a little bit more so you can see it a little better. So yeah, that's pragmatics for you, right? Well, what about vocabulary? It needs to also be in different categories. So if you're, all the vocabulary is a nouns, how are you going to supposed to combine words? Right. It's going to be very difficult. So you need verbs, you need adjectives, you need nouns. Fair. Obviously, if a child hits a certain point and that those words are functional, your child will start combining words. Right? So the second thing is symbolic play. And symbolic play is very important because play is related to cognitive abilities and also being able to like join concepts with Real life objects. Right. And that's basically language because when I say cup, it relates to a real life object. That's a cup. Right. So symbolic play is the ability for a child to use to play with things that are slightly imaginative, like, meaning we have a symbolic play test that we've been using in our field for a very long time. Since the 19, I don't know, 70s or 80s, I'm guessing. Right. But whenever I got that set, it was always like kind of rugged and very old. But my point is it's just a set of a doll and like a comb and a toothbrush and different things that you can act on the doll. And that's symbolic because. And also act out like impossible events. For example, like the doll would grasp onto the cup and drink like this. When they let go, it just falls. Right. That's symbolic. Right. So I'm trying to say these things are the things that you should be teaching so that you can help your child catch up. Right. Pragmatics is relating to the language use and how the language is used in context. Right. So for instance, if a child falls down and says, are you okay to himself? That's pragmatically not that. Correct. Right. And your child, if you want something, he pulls your hand. That's an appropriate way, socially speaking and contextually speaking, to get what they want. And that's also a pragmatic problem. So this is something that we can teach. Okay. And the last thing is motor skills, which we don't really teach in speech and language therapy or ABA therapy. These are usually through OT or pt, Right. Occupational therapy and physical therapy, like the seven predictors within these big categories yielded sensitivity to extrapolate to like low language at 11 years old. So these things should be, should be the things that we are, we should be working on when we're trying to get our children to catch up. Right. In our other video, we do discuss that, you know, language is a long run thing. Right. We're in the long run. And you know, we're trying our best to help our children to catch up, but sometimes you just need to keep on doing and pray for the best because this is outside of our control. We can only control how intense and how well we do our therapy and teaching and hoping that it won't be too, be too stressful for the child at the same time. Right. So other than that, at 36 months, at 3 years of age. Right. There are also seven predictors relating to morphosyntax. What does morphosyntax mean, so what morphology, there's two parts, morpho and syntax. So don't kill me if I'm doing the definitions of these words incorrectly. I'm not a linguist, okay? It's made up of morpho and syntax. Morphology and syntax, right? Morphology just means how a word is supposed to interact with other words in a certain situation. So basically, grammar, like, so if a child, can they understand tenses, right? That's also a part of morphology, right? If you add a prefix and a suffix and then syntax just basically means sentence structure, right? So the whole word just means grammar, basically. How well are they in terms of, like, creating sentences that fits the rules of language? Okay, and you can see this. When a child speaks, right? Do they use the words in the correct order? Are the sentence structures correct? Right. Do they skip some of the prefix suffixes? Right. All these you can see, okay? And this is also about sentence length. So how many words are they able to combine? That's also something we look at, right? So all these are the things we're trying to shoot for when we're teaching a kid, right? When we're teaching language, it's kind of like a symptomatic approach sometimes, sadly. And what we got to do is like, if they don't know this, then we teach that, right? If the sentences are not long enough, we make it longer, right? If they don't have the structures, we put more structure, right? If they don't know the rules about like certain tenses or whatnot. So then we do that, right? So how about vocabulary also at 36 months, vocabulary is also a very important thing. So to expand your child's vocabulary is always, always important. But what this is missing here is that vocabulary needs to be taught in a way that is contextually appropriate. So that's why you need to have good play, right? If you don't have good play skills, then it's very hard for a child to understand what the vocabulary is. Is about, right? At three years of age, if we're teaching with flashcards, the child has more cognitive abilities. They can start to generalize themselves. But vocabulary, at three years of age, we still try to lean on a naturalistic play or like structured play to teach those vocabs effectively. If we teach with flashcards, we want to be able to use those words in play as well first and then bring it to everyday life, right? Parent child interaction is very important. So you need to understand if your parent child interaction is bad, is not as good as it should be. It's Also a predictor towards your child in, you know, in eight years time. And why I talk about this, let's just talk about like a example, a story I always talk about on agents of speech. You might have heard of this before. So a daughter, a girl who's like 12 years old always tells the mom to go away, all right? And didn't have a good interaction between them too. She was always stuck at like one word at 12 years old. Imagine that. And until then, I started to tell the mother to teach play, right? Don't care about the language, don't make her talk so many times. Just think about how to make it fun for the kid, right? Make the interaction fun. So we fast forward for like 11 months, right? She finally started to talk in sentences, right? And then every time the mom has a new game, she would be very, very happy to do it. And then she became an emcee at the Christmas ball, let's say of school. And this was never possible if she stuck at one word. And it was all because the parent child interaction was made fun and made into something that is an asset, right? And the last one is parental stress, which actually in my opinion is fair enough because the more stressed a parent is, the more stressed they will like reflect onto the child. And the more stressed the child is about the language, then the less they will actually enjoy and actually learn. So you need to remember for these two things what I'm trying to highlight. Parent child interaction and parental stress. These two are super important when you're teaching a child, don't make it not fun. I'm going to say don't make it stressful for both you and the kid. All right? Try to strive for, right? Let's move back to the, to the 24 months of two year old predictors, right? Think about how to make it fun. Think about play, increase the play skills. Don't think about language, right? Think about pragmatics. How can you make your child understand at different contexts? They're supposed to use different language forms, meaning what words, what sentence types, you know, like answering questions, dealing with language. Use pragmatics first and then when you have that, your stress will go down. Because all you have to teach because your interaction is good with your kid, all you got to do is increase the vocabulary, right? And also teach the relevant sentence structures and rules in language. That's all right. So hopefully this has given you some more context and more encouragement about what to do at home and everything that you see within online about like speech therapy at home or Whatnot, we're always targeting these things. But the most important thing at home are these two. Parental stress and parent child interaction. If you don't get these to to optimal point, then no matter what you do, it's not going to be a good experience and your child's not going to learn. All right, so in short, will your child, like, outgrow language and speech and language delay? Well, the short answer is yes, but it depends how long. Right. And in the other video that we talk about, will your child ever catch up? You know, like, you see that language skills is something that has a domino effect, Right. As one skill is not enough, it will affect another skill. Right. If they cannot talk, then maybe they cannot read as well. Right. And if a lot of times you require reading to learn, then that's going to affect the learning and they're going to fall behind. Right. So what you got to do is to look at what is lacking and fill in those gaps as soon as you can. Okay? So that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to read this whole thing yourself, be my guest. The link is down below. And if not, you should go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that we recommend parents to get when they start home therapy. Okay, that's it. Hope to see you in the next video. Bye. Bye.