Does Imagination ABA Therapy have a waitlist?

No. We provide in-home ABA therapy with no waitlist, so your child can start care quickly.

What insurance do you accept?

We accept most major insurance plans and all NJ Medicaid (NJ FamilyCare).

What areas do you serve?

We serve families throughout New Jersey, from Atlantic City to Newark and everywhere in between.

Do you offer services in Spanish?

Yes. Our team provides ABA therapy and family support in both English and Spanish.

Fewer Words, Clearer Communication: Rethinking How We Teach Language to Kids with Autism (2 of 3)

Hans Nakdimen

Aug 31

3 min read

Updated: Sep 8

This is the second post in our series on how ABA teaches functional skills before full understanding follows. In our last post, we looked at why a child does not need to understand why a behavior matters before they can learn to do it reliably. Here, we apply that same idea to the words themselves.

When we teach communication skills to children with autism, more words are not always better. In fact, extra words, even well-intentioned, polite, conversational ones, can actually make it harder for a child to learn what we are trying to teach. This is something we think about constantly in ABA, and it starts with a simple but important question: how much language does a child actually need to successfully communicate a request?

The Problem with Filler Words

Take a common scenario: getting a child to go to the treadmill as part of their daily schedule. The instinct for most adults is to say something like, it is time to go on the treadmill, or let's go to the treadmill. But if the goal is to teach a child to independently follow a visual schedule or routine, all of that extra language can actually get in the way.

If a child's schedule simply shows a picture, or the word treadmill, they do not need a full sentence to understand what comes next. The picture or the single word already carries the meaning. Adding it is time to, let's go, or okay now does not clarify the instruction, it complicates it. For a child who is still building language processing skills, every unnecessary word is one more thing to filter through before they get to the actual instruction.

This is one reason visual schedules are so effective. A child can look at a schedule, see treadmill, and go, without needing us to narrate the transition in full sentences every time. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) identifies functional communication training, teaching the most essential, functional words first, as a foundational goal of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention.

Rethinking "I Want"

This same idea applies to how we teach requesting. Many communication systems, including picture exchange systems, are built around the phrase I want, with a picture or button for I, another for want, and then the specific item. But for many learners, especially those who are minimally verbal, that structure adds complexity without adding function.

If a child wants a treadmill, cereal, or a toy, the most essential piece of information is the item itself. Interestingly, in many languages, word order naturally places the action or object earlier, house go, cereal want, rather than the subject-first structure we default to in English. When we require a child to first indicate I, then want, before they can indicate what they actually want, we are adding a layer of language processing that is not necessary for the core communication to succeed.

That does not mean politeness or fuller language is not a goal. For learners who are ready, we absolutely build toward more complete, socially typical requesting. But for a child just starting to build functional communication, focusing on the single most important word, the target item itself, often gets them communicating successfully much faster than requiring the full I want framework from day one. Clinical research on minimally verbal children with autism supports individualized vocabulary selection based on each child's current communication level, rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all sentence structure.

Meeting Each Child Where They Are

The bigger principle here is one we come back to often: effective teaching means stripping communication down to exactly what a specific child needs, not what feels most natural or polite to us as adults. For some learners, that means single words and pictures. For others, especially those with stronger language skills, we build toward fuller, more typical sentence structures and social language, including the why behind politeness and phrasing. There is no single right answer, but there is a right answer for each individual child, and figuring that out is exactly what individualized ABA treatment is designed to do.

At Imagination ABA Therapy, every treatment plan is built around how each individual child actually learns and communicates, not a generic template. We proudly accept NJ Medicaid with no waitlist for eligible families, and our team offers services in both English and Spanish.