Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose

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During our sixth month, Dylan was producing far less-colorful language, in general, but it was almost all “transparent,” and easy for familiar partners to “read.” Following is a short excerpt from a session during that time. The two clinicians are labeled C1 and C2: Peters, Ann, The Units of Language Acquisition (1983), electronic version at www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann, 2002. This search will find all words using these letters, and only these letters, in our word list of over 221,719 words. Use the buttons below the word list to sort the words by length, and then reverse the list to place the longest words first. Get more words with these letters. Dylan still produced numerous utterances at Stage 3, where he experimented with word (and concept) combinations: No I really agree with that, it’s as if our totality as people and our life experience is completely

When Colin Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, Campbell was thrown headlong into a grief so deep he felt he might lose his mind. He found much of the common wisdom about coping with loss—including the ideas that grieving is a private and mysterious process and that the pain is so great that “there are no words”—to be unhelpful. Drawing on what he learned from his own journey, Campbell offers an alternative path for processing pain that is active and vocal and truly honors loved ones lost. Blanc, Marge, “Language Development in Children with Autism: A Practical Approach to Gestalt and Echolalic Learning Styles”, Presentation to Wisconsin Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, 1998. It was imperative to be lively, friendly, and fun, and to give Dylan something that he couldn’t get anywhere else (meeting his sensory-motor needs helped!) He learned that listening to us was entertaining, and he trusted us to give him language he could use to keep us playing with him! Dylan still used movie gestalts as well, and mitigated them nicely, but all his language was becoming increasingly “transparent” and easier-to-interpret. Following are some utterances from our third month: OK, so this language acquisition processing of typical kids may make some sense, as you think about boys you have known (or been!)…but, what about our kids…what about Will…what about your own child? So, let’s return to Dylan’s story. When he had been in therapy for a little over a year, his use of generative grammar had been at Stage 4 for a few months. A language sample at that time revealed Stage 4 constructions (Developmental Sentence Scoring levels 1-3) such as the following, and a few Stage 5 constructions (DSS levels 4-6):Nearby organisations and charities that support people affected by mental health problems, such as local Minds We also knew that now, the sky was the limit, and that during the next few years, we would be able to support Dylan through Stages 4-6, as he learned to produce all the grammar of childhood! We also knew that, since he already knew about whole stories, he was way beyond how his rudimentary generative sentences sounded. Just as we knew not to take him literally before, we knew not to take him literally now!

A group of people with life-limiting conditions, and those who have experienced the death of a loved person, came together to discuss their involvement with people who had the task of supporting those approaching the end of life. Grandin, Temple, Conversations with Kathleen Dunn, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI: Wisconsin Public Radio, February 18, 2005.Word Scramble games are created by rearranging jumbled letters. Players then rearrange these random letters into meaningful words. For instance, you might unjumble the word 'BOWLERS' or 'BELOW' from the letters SROEWLOB. Rearranging random letters is also called anagramming. Anagramming can be a game in and of itself, and has been practiced for hundreds of years. Old kings liked to rearrange and arrange the letters in words and see what other words they could find. Many modern word games also find their basis in the rearranging fun of anagrams. Prizant, Barry M. and P. J. Rydell, “An analysis of the functions of delayed echolalia in autistic children”. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 27, 1984.

Every day we create a new puzzle for our readers. Play our Word Scramble Daily Anagram Game. Each of our sets of words has a given 'theme' to guide it, and to help you solve the puzzles faster. For instance, one week we might do a 'weather' theme and include words like thermometer, temperature, rainbow, and thunderstorm. Or we might do a word-themed puzzle, and include words like: anagram, scrambled, dictionary, and letters. You can also opt to solve the daily word scramble without revealing the clue, to make the game a little bit more challenging. The Word Scramble changes every day, so there is always a fresh anagram for you to decode and discover. You can also go through and play past iterations of the Daily Word Scramble to further practice your anagramming and rearranging skills. Freed, Jeffrey and L. Parsons, Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World, NY, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

It is telling that at Stage 3, Dylan didn’t use accurate sentences, and we didn’t care! We wanted him to explore, explore, explore…and to hear and use words in all kinds of combinations! In our clinic today, just as ten years ago, we spend plenty of time at Stage 3, knowing that kids will naturally move on to Stage 4 when they are ready. As you can see, we believe in this process, because we have seen it unfold scores of times. We don’t need to teach kids to use, “I want…”and “I see…” prematurely, because, when they are ready, they will use these sentences…and so many more…naturally! We helped Karen learn to build useful, flexible “gestalts” into their daily lives. Recognizing that all language that surrounds a child constitutes inadvertent “models,” we wanted to make sure that Daniel heard not only Walt Disney’s language, but plenty of other language that would become useful in everyday communication. “Let’s get out of here!” works much of the time, but “Come on!” is more generally communicative. The process outlined in the preceding paragraph summarizes the findings of researchers like Barry Prizant, Amy Wetherby, and others, and is the one we have used in our clinic for the last ten years. Translating these steps into action, we in our clinic have successfully helped scores of children on the spectrum develop language naturally. We’re here to talk about all this – and more – in this new column on topics in communication competence that affect individuals on the autism spectrum. In the next few columns you’ll see “gestalt language development” on the spectrum presented in a new light. You will see it as a natural process (both on and off the spectrum), with predictable developmental stages. You will see that at Stage 1, multi-word language “gestalts” are used communicatively. At Stage 2, these gestalts are broken down, or “mitigated” into two parts and recombined with other language chunks to produce semi-original utterances. At Stage 3, these phrases are further broken down into single words and word-parts, or “morphemes,” and kids begin to generate their own original sentences! At Stages 4 and higher, ASD kids look very much like “typical” (or more accurately, “analytic”) language processors as they start to develop more grammatically-complex sentences! He can request things he wants, saying ‘I want Dumbo,’ or ‘I want skiing’. He can also take a scripted turn like, ‘I like St. Louis Cardinals. Do you like St. Louis Cardinals?’ Will’s mother, Sally, continued that she wanted to see if we could work on Will’s sentence structure, to see if he could learn to say other sentences without prompting. Her ABA therapists had done all they could, she said, and talking seemed to be what Will needed the most help with.