By the time my non verbal child turned 8 he started using some words, he communicates a bit differently and the words dont always come out until he's absolutley desperate to be understood and usually quite distressed.
I often wonder if thats because we had so many years of being able to communicate without speech that he doesn't yet realise that using the words will speed up the process.
It's like he has to be near meltdown for real words to form.
He still does of lot of dragging us to things and and screaming and I'll just (try to) ignore the screeches and model the speech instead.
However he understands a lot more than we thought so working on Yes or No was a good start for us. We offer something then lead with questions that have simple yes or no answers and we will hold back for a moment until we get a sign or word as an answer.
He loves music too and also vocalises a lot to music and he will rewind it back to chorus and and sound it all out with his noises.
He used to do the mouth thing too where he would open our mouths to sing or just to move our mouth around like a puppet or inspect us while we were talking.
Quite recently he started to sing along to parts of nursery rhymes!
It feels like he finds it easier to sing than to speak so a lot of our communication at home is quite sing-songy but he seems to be responsive to it.
I don't care what anyone thinks about kids and screens but having access to a tablet and youtube really helped us. We also installed a text to speech app and a picture to speech app and he copies the things sometimes.
Sometimes he'll just be sat there and go "I'm peppa pig" and I'll be so excited because it will be the most I've heard him say in a week.
We do an exercise after brushing teeth where we go down to his level and copy his stims and eventually he started to pay close attention to that and we would break the stims down into the individual letter sounds and do them really slowly with him, after a few months we still do that but now he likes to do a back and forth so we'll do his sound then l'm allowed to choose a sound and he'll practice copying mine.
For example Mmmmm or Eee.
Come to think of it it's a bit like the way kids practice phonics.
Sometimes I have to put his hand on my throat to show him the vibrations that certain sounds make, or ill try to shape his mouth while he's vocalising to show him the change or do silly things like tapping his lips to make the silly noises we used to make as kids.
We also taught him to make his noises into a fan and one day he started shouting what sounded like words into it!
I don't know if any of that helped him learn or if we were just lucky But it was never expected after almost 7 years of silence. So we're just so pleased.
He may not ever be able to hold a full conversation and i still worry about him being understood by people who are not close to him but I'm still so so proud of where he is now.
I hope your boy finds his way to communicate. x