Supporting your child with communicating to others
This section focuses on supporting your child to communicate their wants and needs and many other things too.
If your child has difficulty communicating their wants and needs or other very simple things then focus on strategies within these first two advice pages:
2. Helping your child to communicate what they want
If your child can clearly communicate what they want and need but has a limited vocabulary, then try some of the strategies and activity ideas on the following page:3. Developing your child's vocabulary
If your child can communicate in short sentences you can then support them to join ideas and sentences together by trying some of the strategies and activity ideas on this advice page:4. To help with joining ideas and sentences together and further developing vocabulary
If your child is talking but you are concerned that their speech is difficult to understand have a look at this advice page:It is important to note:
Autistic children may differ in how they learn language so you may need to use particular strategies depending on what type of language learner they appear to be. Please see below for more details.
Some autistic children may be more ‘Analytical Language Learners’, meaning they learn language word by word.
Other autistic children may be more ‘Gestalt Language Learners’ and tend to learn language in chunks (i.e. phrases).
Gestalt Language Learners
- start off by copying words and phrases they hear other people say around them or from TV/video clips.
- They do not use individual words from their phrases to create other new phrases.
- Their phrases usually contain a good level of grammar and be said using rich intonation patterns.
- They may start to combine their phrases together as their language develops. They may then begin to understand the individual meaning of the words they are using.
- Once they understand the individual meaning of words they may go on to create their own unique phrases
For both Analytical Language Learners and Gestalt Language Learners
- modelling simple language in everyday situations is going to be helpful, particularly if you model language about what your child is focussed on.
If you think your child is more of a Gestalt Language Learner also consider the following
- If your child says a chunk of language to you, usually they will be trying to communicate something with it. What they are trying to communicate may not be clear to you.
- Be a detective and try and work out what they are trying to communicate. For example, if they say “do you want water?” they may be trying to communicate “I want water” but they are just repeating back the phrase they have heard around the time they are given some water.
- Acknowledge their communication by responding to what they are trying to communicate.
- If you are unsure what they are trying to communicate respond in a more general way e.g. by giving them a smile, saying “okay”, repeating back their phrase.
- Try to avoid asking them lots of questions as they may just copy these, instead try and model language as if it is your child saying it. For example, instead of saying “do you want water?” just say “water” and offer them some.
- Help them understand the individual words in the phrases they are using by trying to point or show them the meaning of the main words in the phrase e.g. point to a glass of water.
- You could help them communicate a wider variety of things by changing the last word/s in phrases they are using to help them express a wider range of meanings. For example, if they use a phrase which starts with “let’s go….” Then you could model “lets go play”, “let’s go to the park”.
Last updated20 Jan 2025