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

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In our clinic, we have found that intervention that acknowledges this naturally-occurring progression makes all the difference for children who cannot get there on their own. Your task, then, is to pay attention just to the loud parts, and to repeat them back as the important mitigations they almost are!

Will’s case, and those of other children who are beyond the preschool and early elementary years, is much more complex.

He used to “recite” lines from his favorite videos, like Mary Poppins and Back to the Future…including some sound effects like cars screeching, and an electric guitar hitting the high notes. 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! So therapy with Will began with this strategy…with acknowledging, and helping Will’s parents further acknowledge, the language gestalts Will used. Even though Cam was moderately dyspraxic, and mostly silent up until then, he did have the motor strength and coordination to say something at a relatively young age. 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.

Repetitive games and stories were also created so Daniel could hear, “Let’s play with the…” and “It’s a…” a bizillion times a day. It will also be available to download within 48 hours, and you can find it either as a new resource, or under 'Alternative versions' above.

But even if it just seems like a sound contour, without any words you can distinguish, repeat it back…try for the tone and the vowels, if you can. If I had decided to work at Stage 3 (single words) or Stage 4 (“I want…” and “I see…” for example), I would have made the most common mistake of well-meaning adults working with children on the spectrum. Before long, just like with Bevin, he will be expecting that you will listen…and then the magic happens…he talks to you! And when children learn any language as a skill, they have a certain, limited level of success; when they move through a developmental progression, however, the sky is the limit!

Step 3 is to review the charts in Part 3 of this series of articles on Natural Language Acquisition (September-October 2005 issue) and find some matches with what your child says.Her ABA therapists had tried to ignore this “movie talk,” and had encouraged Will to talk in ways people understood. But, unlike a few years ago, it was clear that Dylan would “mitigate” from these gestalts quickly, find what he wanted from them, and use them in his own unique ways.

If this language environment matches an analytic predisposition in the child, language is acquired accordingly. By the time these children are four and five years old, they have successfully analyzed their long story chunks (they really were word strings, not “jargon” at all, but too hard to pronounce by young tongues!

If you have any issues, suggestions, ideas, or complaints, definitely get in touch with us via our contact form, Twitter, or Facebook. So, get used to really listening when he is talking to himself, when he is using what sounds like “gibberish,” and pay close attention to what sounds like “movie talk. Because they begin with multiword strings of words, attempting to say them as “unanalyzed chunks,” their articulation skills may render their attempts unintelligible. Old kings liked to rearrange and arrange the letters in words and see what other words they could find.