If your child is using echolalia and/or has a diagnosis of autism, then your child’s way of processing language is most likely different to the classic way children typically learn language. We call this process Natural Language Acquisition or Gestalt Language Processing.
Step by Step guide to Gestalt Learning
Let’s explore the following stages of Gestalt Processing:
Stage 1: communicative use of whole language gestalts
(e.g., “let’s get out of here”)
Children and young people in this stage use echolalia. They need to hear more gestalts or scripts. So, your job is to model, model, model and to use functional language that your child can repeat back.
Stage 2: mitigated into chunks and re-combining these chunks
(e.g., “let’s get” + “some more”) and (e.g., “let’s get” + “out of here”)
This is when you take parts of gestalts or phrases and then combine it with other parts.
Stage 3: further mitigation (single words recombining words, formulating two-word phrases)
(e.g., “get…more”)
They are going beyond their gestalts. Furthermore, they may begin to label different objects.
Stage 4: formulating first sentences
(e.g., “let’s get more toys”)
You may see more grammatical errors during this phase as they are creating unique sentences. Please don’t worry about this, it means they are playing and experimenting with language. As communication partners, you could model the correct form of the sentence.
Stages 5 & 6: formulating more complex sentences
(e.g., “how long do you want to play inside for?”)
You can see that language learning is a process, that is trialled and tested, used in different contexts for children to be able to learn and use language appropriately.
My next blog will give you activities ideas and how you might use them specifically with a Gestalt Language Processor.
Remember early intervention is vital. So, if you have any concerns, please seek the advice of a Speech and Language Therapist.
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
This is an exciting time for both you and your baby! Between 3 and 6 months, communication literally explodes. While your little one may not be saying words yet, he or she is actively learning to understand and express themselves. Here’s a glimpse into what you can expect:
Understanding:
Recognises familiar voices:
Your baby will likely turn his or her head towards the sound of your or other familiar adults’ voices.
Tips for supporting and expanding: Talk, sing and chant! Your baby will love and smile at hearing your talking voice, and he or she will not be judging your singing talent! You can sing to your hearts content, perhaps some lovely nursery rhymes you remember from your childhood, or festive songs like Jingle bells !. Or you can simply make up your own little songs and chants alongside all the daily activities you do with or for your baby. You could have a ‘nappy’ song, a ‘let’s get you ready for the park’ song, a ‘I’m hungry’ song or a ‘mummy’s cooking soup’ chant. It does not have to be beautiful but what does help is having little rhymes and rhythms to your singing. Your baby will love it and soak it all up.
Begins to understand ‘no’:
Your baby may pause or stop an action when you say ‘no’ and shake your head at the same time.
Tips for supporting and expanding: I don’t think that at this stage you will have much cause to say ‘no’ to be fair but you could do it playfully and bring it into a ‘no more’ situation so that your baby can make the connection between ‘no’ and ‘finished’ or ‘stop’ or ‘done’. Feeding might be a good opportunity for this one. You could also ask ‘who is it’ when someone is ringing the bell or coming down the stairs, e.g. ‘oh I hear footsteps! Is this daddy??…. no it’s not daddy no it’s grandma! daddy’s gone out!’
Responds to his or her name:
Your baby will start to show a reaction when you call his or her name.
Tips for supporting and expanding: Try calling your baby’s name a lot, and get different family members or visitors calling your baby by his or her name and calling his or her name before saying ‘look’ or ‘peek-a boo’ etc.
Use Baby Signing: You can introduce simple gestures and signs such as ‘milk’ ‘nappy’ ‘sleep’ ‘dog’ ‘cat’ etc to help your baby make the connection between what you are saying and what he or she is seeing.
Expressing:
Cooing, gurgling and babbling:
These sounds are more than just adorable! They are your baby’s way of experimenting with his or her voice and learning to control his or her vocal cords.
You might hear sounds like ‘ba-ba-ba’ or ‘ga-ga-ga’. This is a huge milestone!
Tips for Supporting and expanding: This is a wonderful time to copy your baby’s sounds, celebrate them and show your baby that you are listening to his or her sounds and you are understanding everything he or she is saying! This is also a brilliant time to start reading to your baby. You can read any children’s books you fancy. Again your baby will adore the sound of your voice but increasingly he or she will also look at the pages of a book and try and understand and make connections between the words you say and the pictures he or she sees.
When you hear your child babbling you can try and give it meaning where possible, for example your baby says: ‘ba ba ba’ you could fall into ‘Baa Baa black sheep have you any wool’ song or you could say ‘mmmh banana!’ And show a banana that’s lying on the table. Or you could just say: ‘baba baaaaah you are saying ba! That’s so great!’ Anything goes really at this stage!
Facial expressions:
Your baby uses smiles, frowns, and other facial expressions to communicate his or her emotions (happy, sad, angry).
Tips for supporting and expanding: Try and make interesting and exaggerated facial expressions yourself when you are talking to your baby! Try and be a little bit clowney and really practise showing ‘surprise’ ‘boo’ or a big grin, smile, purse your lips, blow raspberries, open and close your mouth and make funny faces. Copy your baby when you see his or her facial expression change. When your baby looks confused, say ’oh we don’t know what’s happening we are confused!’. When your baby looks happy, say ‘you look soo happy! What a lovely smile!’
Eye contact:
Your baby will start making more and more eye contact with you during interactions.
Tips for supporting and expanding: Try and get ‘face to face’ a lot with your baby. When cuddling your baby look at his or her face and often make sure that it is easy for your baby to see and look at you. If you can lower your position so that your face is in line with your baby that will make things easier for you both.
Good games to play: ‘People-Games’ these are games where you do not need any toys to have a good time. All you need is the other person: Peek-a-boo, bumping your baby up and down on your lap with a song, Row Row Row your boat, tickling games, catch you games etc.
Now we are at 6 months another very exciting stage has arrived: feeding SOLIDS to our baby! More of this in my next post!
When to Seek Guidance:
If you have any concerns about your baby’s communication development, please don’t hesitate to consult with me. Early intervention can make a significant difference and really help your baby making progress.
Remember: Every baby develops at his or her own pace. These are general guidelines, and some babies may reach certain milestones earlier or later than others.
Feeding and Dysphagia (Swallowing) Specialist The London Speech and Feeding Practice
The London Speech and Feeding Practice
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
When you have a picky eater it’s easy to feel on edge and that others are judging your parenting skills. It is astonishing how suddenly the world and its brother/sister are all experts on how to feed your child, even the lady in the corner shop is not shy to offer unsolicited tips and advice on your child’s nutrition intake. They will say “try this or that“, “how about these new crackers (only £1.99 special offer)” but…
The fact is often that you are very concerned about what your child is eating. And you desperately want to give them a healthy, nutritious packed lunch but you know that it will get left, unopened, and unfinished. So, instead, you stick to the same sad soft cheese sandwich on white bread as it is at least something you know they’ll eat.
Sensory needs can impact on eating with both individuals with and without other conditions. We need to consider all these elements:
taste (sweet vs. sour)
consistency (crunchy vs. soft)
temperature (hot vs. cold)
colour (beige vs. colourful)
and smell (pungent vs. mild)
Let’s take a blueberry as an example: it can be sweet or sharp; it can be firm or mushy; it can even differ in colour. Now let’s look at a piece of cereal: it’s crunchy all the time; it looks the same. It’s very predictable, and therefore less anxiety provoking.
Find our top tips here:
Check with a medical professional that there is nothing physically wrong (e.g. gastrointestinal, or anatomical structural difficulties).
For swallowing difficulties, whether confirmed or suspected, please book an assessment with a certified swallowing/feeding Speech and Language Therapist or please contact me.
Does your child have confirmed or suspected allergies? If so, please contact a dietician who has experience with allergies and can advise, for example: Dr Rosan Meyer.
Talk to other family members about food and their experiences of food. Perhaps there is a family tendency to be picky with eating/food avoidant. This may be important information that you can share with your clinician during the case history taking.
Be patient, though this is easier said than done/felt! Know that many children need repeated exposure to food(s) before liking them, up to 14 spoons! So, take it at your child’s pace and it’s vital we don’t force them to try new foods or use bribes.
You can provide opportunities to engage with food, perhaps you could cook with your child, and allow them to choose what they want to cook. For younger children try Messy Food Play – there are tons of suggestions on Pinterest for ideas on how to incorporate foods into play activities or ask your feeding-Speech and Language Therapist.
You may want to talk about pictures in books that introduce new foods (e.g. The Very Hungry Caterpillar for younger children or magazines if older).
You can play with toy food in a toy kitchen for little ones, or comment on supermarket adverts for young people who are older.
Offer opportunities to taste new foods. You could use a toothpick for bite-sized pieces.
Be sure you eat together with your child as often as you can, modelling positive eating behaviour is most important and can be really effective over time.
You could ask your child to sort foods by colour or stack them on a plate.
We know that Autistic Spectrum Conditions often come with hypersensitivity to textures, so consider what your child prefers (e.g. they may not like slices of tomato but prefer the runnier texture of a tomato sauce).
Reward and give praise following your child’s flexibility with foods and their attempts to try and not whether they like/dislike the food, for example “well done for touching the avocado!” Or “great you licked your fingers with the humous on, that’s excellent”.
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
When you have a child who uses Gestalts it is often difficult to think and adapt clinic activities into those to use at home. More importantly, you find that individualising your activities for your child who uses Gestalt are time-consuming. But you value its importance for their communication development.
You feel so busy, you are taking them to other appointments, or trying to get through your daily activities, all whilst still ensuring your child’s emotional needs are met. You know life should not get in the way of your child’s therapy activities at home, but it does. We know your spare time is precious and limited, so let us achieve your child’s or young person’s goals in the allotted time you have which meets their way of learning (using Gestalts).
We wanted to support you by exploring items which you may have at home, and we will give you some key phrases which you can start to model with your child. Whereas our last blog introduced the idea of gestalt language processors, we are now developing ideas to give you the tools to implement activities at home. We recognise how overwhelming it may feel, and this is one of the reasons to make activities as straight forward as possible. Therapy does not need to be complicated; it just needs to be carried out on a regular basis.
Explore the samples I’ve created to give you an idea of how this might look but please consult with a Speech and Language Therapist who knows about Gestalt Language Processing so that you can work together to develop great home activities for your child.
Want to learn more about gestalt language processing?
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
Is our student ready to move to NLA 2 (Natural Language Acquisition stage 2)?
We know that the GLP (Gestalt Language Processor) will move into the next stage when they are ready. But are they now ready you might think? When are they ready? How do I know? If you are not sure whether your child is ready to move forward then go and see your GLP trained Speech Therapist. Together you can work out what the next steps are and how to help your child settle into NLA 2. It’s very exciting!!
Tip
The first useful tip: keep a language sample of phrases your child says. This is very helpful!
You might want to check with your Speech Therapist and offer some language sampling you have taken so they can help you figure out where your child is currently. Always keep an Utterance Journal that you can share with your Speech Therapist and with others who look after your child.
Basically, we want to listen out for phrases our child says that you or nursery don’t say routinely; that way you can presume that this is not an echo but a mixing together of two chunks of gestalts. Watch out for those coco melon phrases though: double check it really isn’t an NLA 1 gestalt that is copied verbatim from a favourite you tube video.
You can best support your child best by listening, and thus figuring out what your child is TRYING TO SAY. Often your child might skip over the parts of gestalts they don’t want to say. This is common in older kids who have long gestalts, sometimes even whole episodes or whole stories!
Try and tease out their shorter mitigations and then focus on practicing and modelling those as they are so much more useful!
So back to our question: are they ready?
Are their gestalts covering a variety of situations and contexts?
Make a note in your journal to see what the backgrounds are to each phrase you ear, so for example:
Transitioning: ‘it’s time for the park’ ‘what’s next’ ‘shoes on’
Bed Time: ‘we need to wash’ ‘let’s get in (bath/bed)’ ‘ready for our book’
Toilet/nappy: ‘we need the potty’ ‘where’s the potty’ ‘let’s wash hands’
Mealtime: ‘time to eat’ ‘go get a spoon’ ‘yummy num num’
Park/going out: ‘look at the squirrel’ ‘funny doggy’ ‘I wanna swing’
At the shops: ‘let’s get the trolley’ ‘lots of veggies’ ‘no tomatoes’ ‘ooh long queue’ ‘back to the car’
And… does the child use the phrases for a variety of functions?
labelling
providing information
calling out
affirming
requesting
protesting
directing
We need to offer lots of similar language models so that in their own time our children can extract/mitigate useful phrases for what they want to express. The more similar utterances a child hears around him the more he/she can discover the communalities. Once the child has a small range of phrases, he/she can mix them up and create semi-original own phrases.
If the answer is YES!! our child has perhaps not all but a range of functions and a range of situations where they use a variety of easily mitigable gestalts then yes they are ready for moving to stage 2 of NLA!
Hurrah!
Keeping a journal of what your child is saying and in what circumstance is crucial to help with our ongoing detective work!
Next time I will be looking at how we can help our NLA 2 GLP produce even more of their own mix and match phrases.
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
Many of my students have difficulties telling stories. When looking at a book together, even books they love and have seen many times, they often struggle to understand what they are reading and cannot therefore retell the story in any sequence. A great method I often use with those students is called Colourful Semantics.
What is Colourful Semantics?
Colourful Semantics is an approach aimed at helping children develop grammar and meaning of phrases and sentences. We help children identify WHO is the subject in a story, what is he/she/it DOING to WHAT and WHERE. There are lots of colour coded stages but we tend to start with the basic 4:
WHO = ORANGE
DOING = YELLOW
WHAT = GREEN
WHERE = BLUE
Once a student is accomplished at this level, we move on to different colour codes for describing words (adjectives), connecting words (with/together/and/therefore) feeling words (PINK), timing words (BROWN) eg. when, tomorrow, last week etc.
Colourful Semantics is a really useful method and helps children to organise their sentences. It also helps me knowing how to guide a student in thinking about the story.
The approach can be used with children with a range of Speech and Language Needs, such as:
Developmental Delay / Disorder
Autistic Spectrum Condition
Down Syndrome
Any other syndromes and related speech and language delays
General Literacy difficulties
There are a wide range of benefits to using this approach and I use it in my therapeutic work with children of around 3 years plus. Below is a little video which shows how I use it with this student who has general language difficulties associated with Autism. One of the main benefits with this student is that seeing the Cue Cards helps her to use a much wider range of vocabulary than she would ordinarily generate. Her sentences are getting longer and she is more able to answer questions. In general, I find it useful to help with storytelling and to guide us through the story in a sequence.
There are many on-line games these days that have incorporated the Colourful Semantics Approach. Once a child is familiar with the basic colour scheme then gradually the visual prompts can be reduced to using verbal prompts.
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
Say, your child replaces the ‘f’ sound with a ‘p’ so they say PAN when they mean FAN or POUR when they mean FOUR. Now after one or two therapy sessions we have managed to get your child to “bite your lip and blow” and we are seeing a little ‘f’ sound right there! Result! But now we need to practise this so it becomes a habit, so that we can start building up some little words like FAN and FUR and FAR or FOUR….
Now, for older children, let’s say over 6 years old, we might just get away with saying: ‘darling come and sit down now and do your speech practice quickly before you go and play.’ But for the little ones, under 5 years old, it is often necessary to “package” the practice within daily activities.
Daily activities
So, our goal might be: produce an ‘f’ about 50 times a day. You might think: ‘oh gosh, I won’t be able to do that, it’s too much’, but wait! It can actually be done as part of your daily activities.
Here are some little examples and you will be able to think of some more for sure.
Morning
Before brushing teeth look into the mirror together and say ‘let’s practise our “bunny sound” quickly: bite your lip and blow: FFF FFF FFF FFF FFF FFF FFFF’. Look in the mirror, get as many done here as possible, 10-15, RESULT! Now brush teeth and done.
Mid-morning snack
A … muffin? Pop a little birthday candle on it and say: ‘let’s practice our Bunny Sound here quickly: bite your lip and blow and try and blow out this candle.’ FFF FFF FFF FFF FFF (you might have to re-light it a few times). Do 10-15, now eat the cake, done!
Play
Pretend to fly an aeroplane and say: “’oh look, I can make the ‘bunny sound’ and make a noise at the same time VVV VVV VVV VVV VVV. That’s cool, let’s try. Ten times?’
Lunch
‘Oh, that soup is a bit hot, let’s blow it, let’s do it with our “bunny sound”: FFF FFF FFF.’ Do ten and by now you have done most if not all of your repeats.
Book time
Select a book with a lot of ‘f’ sounds it in or a book with bunnies (your Speech Therapist will make suggestions). Read the book together with your child and each time there is a bunny or a fish practise the FFF FFF FFF FFF.
By now you will probably have exceeded your target of 50 times FFFs a day!!
Story telling
Now for something different like “Story Telling”: your child’s goal might be: “to talk about what’s first, then, next and finally”.
Examples:
Tooth brushing
Ask your child to think about what is first, what’s next and then last before you start brushing teeth.
Meal times
Talk about what did we eat the other day at Nando’s? ‘First, I had xxx then I had xxx. What about you?’ Or as you are about to lay the table: ‘what do we need to do first, then and then?’
Dressing
Pretend to be an alien who does not know what to do first, get it all wrong and have a laugh… ‘oh I think those underpants must go on my head?!’ Etc
Play time
Use figurines with farms or Lego houses or Playmobil and help your child make up simple little stories using first, then next and last.
Books
Share a book with a clear start, middle and finish and talk about the characters, who does what, who is first, then and then and finally.
At the end of each session with your child we will talk about what the targets for the week will be and together we can think about how you can incorporate your practice easily into your daily life, no matter how busy you are!
Be sure to bring this up next time you have your session, so that we can figure out together what will work for you and your daily schedules.
Find a speech and language therapist for your child in London. Are you concerned about your child’s speech, feeding or communication skills and don’t know where to turn? Please contact me and we can discuss how I can help you or visit my services page.
