How to teach a child to comment, more than request

Last updated 2026-07-11

A child who only asks for things is having half a conversation. Commenting, pointing out the bus going by, narrating a block tower, reacting to a spilled cup, is what actually drives vocabulary and social connection forward. You build it by modeling comments during play, pausing after something surprising happens, and treating your own reaction as the reward instead of handing over an object. No equipment required, just a change in how you respond.

Why requesting comes so much easier than commenting

Requesting works fast. A child says "juice" or points at the iPad and something good happens right away. That's a clean reward loop, and kids pick it up quickly. Commenting doesn't pay off the same way. If your child says "bus!" while looking out the window, nothing appears. The only reward is your reaction: your face lighting up, your voice matching their excitement, the little exchange that follows. For kids who aren't yet tuned into that kind of social payoff, it just doesn't register the way a cup of juice does.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) describes two broad categories of early communicative functions: instrumental (getting needs met) and social/interactional (sharing an experience with someone else) ^[1]. Most early intervention programs, and most parent instincts, lean heavily on the instrumental side. We celebrate requests because they're obvious proof that language is working. Commenting is quieter and easier to miss, even though it's the gateway to richer language.

Research on joint attention, the shared looking-at-something-together that underlies commenting, shows it's one of the strongest early predictors of later vocabulary size ^[2]. A child who points to a dog just to share it with you is practicing something different from a child who points because they want to pet it. Both matter, but if requesting is the only skill being practiced and rewarded, commenting can lag for a long time.

What counts as a comment

A request aims at getting something: food, help, an object, someone's attention as a means to an end. A comment aims at sharing an experience or observation, with no expected outcome beyond connection. A simple comparison:

Comments can take the shape of single words, gestures, vocalizations, or AAC symbols. The form matters less than the function. A child who pushes a toy car, says "vroom," and glances at you to check you noticed, is commenting. So is a child who signs "bird" when one lands nearby, not because they want it, just because they saw it.

Speech-language pathologists often track the ratio of requesting to commenting in a child's communication. A heavy skew toward requests is worth attention clinically, especially in children with autism, where differences in joint attention and social motivation can make commenting harder to pick up on its own ^[3].

When commenting should show up, and when to worry

Protodeclarative pointing, the gesture of pointing to share something rather than to request it, typically emerges around 12 months ^[2]. By 18 months, most children mix gestures, words, and vocalizations for both requesting and commenting. By 24 months, commenting should make up a meaningful share of communication, though there's no clean cutoff and typical development runs wide. The flag isn't a specific age, it's a pattern. If a 2- or 3-year-old uses language only to get things and never to share an observation, narrate play, or react to something surprising, that's worth raising with a speech-language pathologist. It doesn't automatically mean something is wrong. It means commenting needs deliberate support.

In children with autism, limited protodeclarative pointing and reduced joint attention are among the earliest documented markers, sometimes visible before 12 months in retrospective video studies ^[3]. The 2020 AAP guidelines on developmental surveillance note that loss of social communication skills or absence of pointing by 12 months are red flags warranting immediate evaluation ^[4]. If your child hasn't been evaluated and something feels off as you read this, getting an early intervention evaluation is the right next step rather than waiting it out.

For late talkers without autism, commenting delays are common and often respond well to parent-implemented strategies at home, especially paired with speech therapy.

Teaching it in real life

The core technique is modeling without pressure. Narrate interesting things around you, react to little events with real enthusiasm, and pause to let your child respond. You're not drilling, you're showing them that noticing things out loud is just a natural, rewarding thing people do.

Try sabotaging routines to create openings for comments: drop a toy off the table and say "uh oh!" then look at your child expectantly. Blow bubbles and let one pop, then react. Wind up a toy, let it fall over, and pause. These are small engineered moments of shared surprise. You're not asking a question or prompting a request, you're making something worth noticing and then waiting. When your child does comment, match and expand what they say. If they say "dog," you say "yeah, big dog!" or "dog running!" That's called expansion in the SLP literature ^[5], and it works because you're not correcting, just showing what more could sound like. Comment on what you notice yourself, not what you need: "Oh look, the leaves are moving." "Whoa, that's a loud truck." "Hm, the block fell down." You're the model here, so aim for comments most of the time, maybe 70%, and requests or instructions the rest, roughly the reverse of how most adult-child talk actually goes. When your child makes a spontaneous observation, treat it like gold. Put down what you're doing, make eye contact, match their energy, and say something back that keeps the exchange going. A comment that gets ignored teaches a child that requesting is what actually gets a response. Parallel play narration helps too: sit near your child during play and talk about what you're doing with your own toys, without directing them. "My car is going fast. Oops, it crashed!" You're showing them how to talk about an experience, not how to ask for one.

None of this needs special training, just consistency, which is genuinely hard when you're managing everything else in a day. Fifteen to twenty minutes of intentional, comment-focused play daily is realistic and, based on parent-implemented intervention studies, meaningful ^[6].

Where AAC fits in

AAC helps here quite a bit. One sticky myth about AAC devices and apps is that they're only for requesting. Many are programmed that way by default, with pages built around wants and needs, which quietly reinforces the same requesting-only pattern you're trying to move past.

When you set up or use AAC devices, whether that's a high-tech speech generating device or a low-tech picture board, make sure comment words are easy to reach and get modeled: "look," "wow," "funny," "big," "hot," "broken," "again." These don't request an object, they describe an experience.

Modeling AAC yourself, sometimes called aided language stimulation, means pointing to symbols on the device as you speak, so your child sees comments being made through the system ^[7]. Research on this approach in children with complex communication needs shows increases in both the frequency and the variety of communication functions over time ^[7]. If your child's device has a "quick request" page but no way to say "yuck" or "uh oh," that's worth raising with their SLP. How the vocabulary gets organized shapes which functions actually get practiced.

What about echolalia?

Echolalia, the repetition of phrases heard elsewhere, is common in autistic children and some late talkers ^[8]. A child might echo a line from a show when something surprising happens, or repeat a phrase from a familiar routine. It gets dismissed as "not real language," which is both wrong and unhelpful. Echolalia can function as a comment. If a child watches something fall and says "oh no, Dora!", a line from their favorite show, they're doing something communicatively intentional even though the words are borrowed. The goal isn't to stop the echolalia, it's to recognize the intent behind it and, over time, help new spontaneous forms grow up alongside it.

Our pieces on echolalia and on what echolalia means as a communication function go into this further. The short version: treat echolalia as a starting point, respond to what it seems to be doing, and model other ways to say the same thing without pressuring your child to drop the echoed phrase.

Where do you find chances to model comments during the day?

You don't need a therapy room for this. Comments happen in the ordinary texture of the day, and you already move through dozens of good moments for it every morning before 9am.

At breakfast, react to things out loud: "Ooh, cold milk." "That cereal is crunchy, listen." Then pause. If your child vocalizes or looks at you, respond like it was the most interesting thing you've heard all week. In the bath, water pouring, bubbles, a cup that floats and then sinks, all of that is naturally interesting. Say "whoa, it sank!", look at your child, and wait three to five full seconds before saying anything else. That pause is where a comment can show up. Outside, animals, vehicles, and odd things in the environment are comment gold: slow down, skip the running educational commentary, say one thing, then stop and wait.

During books, read a little less than you normally would. Point at pictures and wait before naming them, and if your child points at something, treat it as a comment: "yeah, bird! Flying bird!" During play, follow their lead and go where their attention goes. If they crash two cars together, your "whoa, crash!" is a comment model, not a question they need to answer.

Researchers call this kind of responsive, child-led interaction "responsive interaction" or "naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention." A 2019 systematic review found that naturalistic approaches produce meaningful communication gains for children with autism and language delays, particularly when caregivers are coached to run them ^[6]. You don't have to call it anything at home. You just slow down and pay attention to what your child is paying attention to.

How do speech therapists build commenting into sessions?

A good SLP spends real time in child-led play, setting up situations where comments are more likely than requests, then responding with enthusiasm to any spontaneous observation. Some track commenting frequency across sessions as a measurable outcome.

In more structured work, some clinicians deliberately create surprising events, something falls, something doesn't work as expected, something unexpected appears, and watch whether the child's first communication is a request, a comment, or neither. This is the "communication temptation" procedure, developed by Amy Wetherby and Barry Prizant in the 1980s and still used as an assessment tool ^[9].

For children with autism, approaches like JASPER (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation) target joint attention and social communication, including commenting, as primary goals rather than leftovers from behavior or requesting work ^[10]. JASPER has randomized controlled trial evidence behind it, which is still fairly rare in speech therapy research. If commenting isn't on your child's goal sheet, ask about it directly: "We've noticed he mostly communicates to get things. Can we work on commenting and joint attention?" A good therapist will welcome that kind of specificity. Families who can't get to in-person therapy have more options now too: online speech therapy has grown a lot, and some telehealth SLPs specialize in coaching parents to run these naturalistic strategies at home.

How long before you see progress?

Honestly, it varies a lot, and nobody has clean population-level data on this specific outcome. The closest evidence comes from studies on joint attention interventions and naturalistic language approaches, which generally show measurable changes in joint attention and commenting frequency within 8 to 16 weeks of consistent work, in children getting a few hours per week of targeted intervention ^[6][10].

At home, without formal therapy, progress is slower and harder to track. A reasonable sign that things are moving: your child starts making more eye contact during interesting events, even before new words show up. Or they start vocalizing or pointing at things without being prompted, even if you can't always tell what they mean. That shift from communicating to get things toward communicating to share things often shows up as nonverbal joint attention well before words catch up.

Keep an informal log if it helps. Once a week, spend 10 minutes in play and just count how many times your child communicated to get something versus to share something. If that second number is growing, even slowly, the work is happening.

If you've been at this three or four months with no movement and your child is 2 or older, get an SLP evaluation if you haven't already, and talk to your pediatrician about early intervention services, which are free under IDEA Part C for children under 3 in the United States ^[4].

Does apraxia change any of this?

Children with apraxia of speech or childhood apraxia of speech have a motor planning difficulty that makes it hard to produce speech even when they know exactly what they want to say. The goal of building commenting doesn't change, but how a child expresses a comment might. For a child with apraxia who has limited reliable speech, AAC becomes especially useful as a way to make comments. A child can touch the "wow" symbol or the "look" symbol even if they can't say those words yet, and the commenting function can develop while speech motor skills get worked on separately.

One practical note: don't wait for clear speech before you accept a comment. A vocalization, a gesture, a point, an AAC activation, all of it counts. If you hold out for clean verbal comments before responding with enthusiasm, you'll lose the window. Accept the approximation and respond to the intent.

Some families using the Little Words app have found it useful for exactly this: a low-pressure way to model comment-function words alongside a child during play, without requiring the child to speak. That kind of low-stakes, repeated exposure fits naturally alongside the naturalistic approaches described above.

Common mistakes parents make with this

The biggest one is turning every moment into a test: "What's that? What color is it? What is the dog doing?" Questions feel productive, but they turn a shared experience into a performance. A child who's constantly quizzed learns to wait for prompts instead of initiating comments on their own, and commenting is inherently spontaneous. It can't be prompted into existence the way a label can.

The second mistake is only responding to words. If you only light up when your child says something verbally, you miss, and slowly extinguish, the points, looks, and vocalizations that are the building blocks of verbal commenting later. Respond to the function, not the form.

Third, narrating too much yourself. There's a difference between modeling comments and delivering a running commentary that fills every silence. Silence and pauses are where children find room to comment, and over-talking crowds that out. Talk less than you think you should, and pause longer than feels comfortable.

Fourth, inconsistency. A week of intensive focus followed by three weeks of normal life won't build a habit in a child who needs more repetitions than average to learn a communication function. Pick two or three daily routines and be consistent with your comment-modeling there. That beats trying to do everything perfectly all the time.

Common questions about commenting and joint attention

Pointing to share something, rather than to ask for it, usually shows up around 12 months. By 18 months most kids are mixing words, sounds, and gestures to point things out to you. If your child is older than 18 months and almost all of their communication is aimed at getting something (food, a toy, help), that's worth a conversation with a speech-language pathologist. The word "almost" matters here: some lopsidedness toward requesting is normal and not a red flag by itself.

A child doesn't need spoken words to comment. Commenting is about intent, sharing an observation with another person, and that intent can come through pointing, eye gaze, facial expression, turning toward something, or an AAC device. Nonverbal children can and do comment, and building that nonverbal skill often lays the groundwork for spoken comments later.

Autistic children requesting more than commenting is common, and it fits with known differences in social motivation and joint attention. That doesn't mean it stays that way forever. Studies of joint attention interventions, including JASPER, show autistic children can build commenting and joint attention skills with the right support, as long as the approach is naturalistic and play-based rather than run like drills.

Joint attention and commenting aren't the same thing, though people mix them up. Joint attention is two people focused on the same thing at the same time. Commenting is one way that shared focus gets put into language: if a child says "dog!" while looking at you and then at the dog, they're doing both at once. Joint attention is the social behavior underneath; commenting is one way to express it.

If your child's words are almost all about getting food or toys, start small: build in little surprises during play. Drop something. Let something break unexpectedly. Blow bubbles and let one pop. React yourself with a quick comment or sound, then look at your child and just wait, five seconds, without prompting. Treat whatever they do as interesting, even a glance or a sound. Do this for ten minutes a day for two weeks before you look for a real shift. Showing up consistently matters more than getting the technique exactly right.

To get "look" or "wow" to come out on their own, model them in moments that are actually surprising, not staged ones. Say "wow" when something genuinely catches you off guard, "look" when you want to point something out. After enough real exposures like this, kids start picking the words up as their own tools. If your child uses AAC, put "wow," "look," and "uh oh" somewhere accessible and model them yourself during play. Drilling these words on their own rarely leads to a child using them spontaneously.

Commenting is tied closely to vocabulary growth. Prospective studies of language development show joint attention and commenting are among the strongest early predictors of how large a child's vocabulary gets later. Comments involve labeling and describing things within a shared moment, which gives words richer context than requests do. A child who comments tends to pick up words in a broader, more textured way than one who mainly requests.

On ABA: traditional discrete-trial, massed-practice ABA can teach the outward behavior of commenting, but getting a child to comment spontaneously, out of real social motivation, tends to respond better to naturalistic approaches like JASPER or responsive interaction therapy, where the reward is built into the interaction itself. Most modern ABA programs blend both approaches. It's reasonable to ask a therapist directly whether spontaneous commenting is something they're actually measuring.

Labeling and commenting look similar but aren't the same. Labeling is naming something, often because someone asked "what's that?" Commenting is bringing up an observation without being prompted. Both use words, but commenting depends on the child initiating and being motivated by shared attention rather than by giving the right answer. Plenty of kids who label well on request still need separate work on commenting, because the motivation behind each is different.

Books work well for this. They're full of things worth pointing at, so the trick is reading less and pausing more: point at something on the page without naming it, and wait. If your child points or makes a sound, respond with enthusiasm, then name the thing and add a small comment, like "yeah, dog! Sleeping dog." Over time kids start pointing at pictures before you prompt them, which is the whole point.

For first commenting words, reaction words go furthest fastest: "uh oh," "wow," "oh no," "yuck," "more" (used to comment, not just request), "look," "again," "gone," "big," "stuck." They come up constantly in daily life, carry enough emotional weight to be worth saying, and are easy to model naturally. If your child uses AAC, these belong on the front page or somewhere quick to reach, not buried in a menu.

To track progress, keep it simple: once a week, watch ten minutes of play and count how often your child communicates to share something versus to get something. Also notice more pointing, more eye contact during interesting moments, and new sounds or words popping up during play. Nonverbal progress often shows up before new words do, so don't judge progress by spoken words alone.

SLPs assess this through language samples and structured play, looking at how often a child comments versus requests, among other functions. One validated tool, the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS) by Wetherby and Prizant, looks specifically at communicative functions including joint attention and commenting in children from 6 to 24 months. It's fair to ask your SLP whether this kind of functional analysis is part of what they're doing in an evaluation.

Sources

1. ASHA, Functional Communication: ASHA describes communicative functions including instrumental (requesting) and social/interactional (sharing experience) as distinct categories of early communication.
2. Mundy P et al., 'Joint attention and vocabulary development,' Child Development, 2007: Protodeclarative pointing emerges around 12 months and joint attention is among the strongest early predictors of later vocabulary size.
3. Zwaigenbaum L et al., 'Early identification of autism spectrum disorder,' Pediatrics, 2015: Limited protodeclarative pointing and reduced joint attention are among the earliest documented markers of autism, sometimes visible before 12 months in retrospective video studies.
4. American Academy of Pediatrics, Developmental Surveillance and Screening Policy: AAP 2020 guidelines note loss of social communication skills or absence of pointing by 12 months are red flags warranting immediate evaluation; IDEA Part C provides free early intervention services for children under 3.
5. ASHA, Language Intervention Approaches for Children: Expansion and extension are SLP-validated techniques where adults repeat and slightly extend a child's utterance to model more complete language forms.
6. Tiede G & Walton J, 'Meta-analysis of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions,' Autism, 2019: A 2019 systematic review found naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions produce meaningful communication gains in children with autism and language delays, particularly with caregiver coaching.
7. Romski M & Sevcik R, 'Augmentative communication and early intervention myths and realities,' Infants and Young Children, 2005: Aided language stimulation (partner-augmented input), where partners model AAC use, increases frequency and variety of communication functions in children with complex communication needs.
8. Prizant B & Duchan J, 'The functions of immediate echolalia in autistic children,' Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 1981: Echolalia in autistic children and late talkers often serves communicative functions including commenting; it should be treated as a starting point rather than eliminated.
9. Wetherby A & Prizant B, Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS), Paul H. Brookes Publishing: The communication temptation procedure and CSBS assess communicative functions including commenting and joint attention in children 6 to 24 months.
10. Kasari C et al., 'Joint attention and symbolic play in young children with autism,' Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2006: JASPER (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation) has randomized controlled trial evidence showing gains in joint attention and social communication including commenting in autistic children.