How To Teach Speech Delayed Children Longer Sentences

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This is one of the most important videos that we've made so far. Increasing sentence length is no joke and speech and language delayed children tend to be stuck at certain stages. And one of those stages is actually the 1-word stage.

Parents are very happy to know that their child can actually speak, however, discouraged because their child is so comfortable just saying one word at a time - because it's actually quite functional.

Enter Gestures.

Yes, gestures are the best way to teach longer sentences in my opinion. And it's backed scientifically. Check out this easy to digest summary paper from ASHA: https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1...
and the full academic paper here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...

Gestures help children acquire the meaning of the word before mastering how to say it. It also helps them begin combining 2 separate words and form sentences. Which it might come as a gesture plus a word - which is still considered communicating 2 things in 1 go, hence a phrase or sentence.

In my clinical experience, I found that nouns are actually acquired earlier. And most of their words are actually nouns. If you take a look at some language developmental milestones: http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/p...
you will see that at 12-18 months (1-2 words per sentence stage), 50% of the child's utterance (stuff they say), are nouns! And it will slowly decrease as their vocabulary repertoire gets bigger.

So that's why we have to teach words from a different class, for example, verbs, which are easy to teach with gestures. There are too many children youtube videos out there that do an excellent job with teaching names of places, vegetables, dinosaurs, cars, and such. It's our job to increase the number of words that the child can use to make sentences.

You see, when we learn a new language, in order to be communicative, we put words together to be more specific. That's why in milestones, we see phrases such as (verb) (object) e.g. "kick ball" or (adjective) (object) "red ball," to emerge. We do not see children saying (object) (object) "ball and cup", as that doesn't really communicate much other than commenting.

Therefore we should use gestures in our everyday speech to teach children when and where to put different words. By the way, that would also teach word order which is grammar. And it would also serve as a cue for them to speak instead of staying quiet.

Everyone can incorporate these techniques into their speech delayed child's routine. No matter what your speech therapist's speech and language goals are, gestures are natural (we use it subconsciously anyways with pointing and such) and it adds another physical dimension to what we mean when we're talking.