LITTLE SPEECH LIFE

Is your child using unintelligible (not understood) strings of language with heavy intonation? Phrases from different shows, YouTube clips or other media? Single words often but not combining them? Immediately repeating things after you?

These are indicators of stage 1 gestalt language processing!

Some characteristics include:

-difficulty answering questions; specifically abstract questions.

-lots of melody or intonation when using verbal language.

-humming or singing often.

-big interest in music or different languages.

-echoing things heard in media or by others that usually have heavy emotion or experience.

-may have many single words but never seems to combine them into two word phrases (go car, more juice, sock on.)

If we notice these characteristics, it’s important we start thinking less about building one word on another but in large chunks, and provide language models to support gestalt language processing. So how do we do that!

Steps:

-ACKNOWLEDGE! Always, always ALWAYS, acknowledge their communication. Their scripts and chunks of language, literal or not, are MEANINGFUL and it is important that we recognize them as so. So, REPEAT AND MODEL. If you have an idea what the script is in reference to then you can repeat theirs to ACKNOWLEDGE and then MODEL something new!

For example:

1. Child: “for real life?!” Parent: “for real life?!” “I’m so excited!”

2. Child: “to infinity and beyond!” Parent: “to infinity and beyond!” “Let’s go!”

Some important things to remember when choosing models:

1. They need to be easy to change up! As we move through to stage 2 we will begin mixing and matching scripts so our stage 1 models need to do so easily. Focus on the following phrase intros: LET’S…, I’M…, IT’S…, WE…! All of these are easily changed such as, “let’s see!, let’s go!, let’s go to the park!, let’s eat dinner!, I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m done with my food, I’m so happy, it’s cold, it’s annoying, it’s a lot of work, we need to go to school, we have to get ready!, we gotta go!, we are late!

2. Use a lot of intonation! Make yourself interesting & exciting!

3. Allow WAIT TIMES and incorporate silence! I know it sounds counter intuitive, but our GLP’s have been so used to being misunderstood, talked at, and told what to say so adding in silence allows them to add to the conversation WITHOUT EXPECTATION!

4. Follow their lead! LISTEN to their gestalts and ACKNOWLEDGE THEM while playing! Play play play! Let them choose the toy and the way THEY want to play with it. Let go of your control over the play session. This will create the most spontaneous and natural language!

If you are having difficulty deciding where to begin with a child and how to best support their language development, please reach out via Instagram @littlespeechlife or email, littlespeechlife@gmail.com!

Happy communicating! 🙂