Posts
This annual event provides opportunities to raise awareness about communication disorders and to promote treatment that can improve the quality of life for those who experience problems with speaking, understanding, or hearing. ASHA have many resources to help you celebrate BHSM every day.
Even though this is mainly celebrated in large scale in the U.S, what can we in Europe doing to raise awareness among professionals, parents and schools.
Being in the Netherlands, with a wide population of expats, families find it difficult to find a native speaking English Speech therapist for their child. Parents feel helpless and not being able to provide help for their child.
Online Speech Therapy can be the answer.Your child can continue to receive Speech Therapy from the same therapist from back home, or find other English speaking therapists in the country. Being in the comforts of your home(both you and the child) with games to practice on their own, TinyEYE Speech Therapy Services opens a whole new magical world for you and your child.
TinyEYE has goal focussed games and you as the therapist is able to provide structured therapy, while the child plays and has fun. A tinyEYE session is usually 20 minutes filled with adventure going to Mars and swimming under water.The fun and excitement is new everytime!
Welcome to the Children's Speech Therapy Corner
Welcome to a Corner filled with Information related to the Speech and Language disorders seen in Children. Information on assessment, intervention strategies, and the latest updates in research. You will also be able to interact with other professionals and parents.
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Friday, April 15, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Reconnect
Its been a long time.. so I wish to reconnect!
Whats been happening in the last year?
1.Our second son was born.
2. We kick started TinyEYE Netherlands and started training Dutch speech therapists to use TinyEYE
3. More clients at the Higher secondary and primary international school.
4. I joined a EAL course at the International school with the teachers.
Well, thats what has been happening and its only getting more exciting and busier.
Stay tuned for some new articles and information.
Whats been happening in the last year?
1.Our second son was born.
2. We kick started TinyEYE Netherlands and started training Dutch speech therapists to use TinyEYE
3. More clients at the Higher secondary and primary international school.
4. I joined a EAL course at the International school with the teachers.
Well, thats what has been happening and its only getting more exciting and busier.
Stay tuned for some new articles and information.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Play in Autism To improve social interaction and comprehension.
Advance for Speech and Language
By Jason Mosheim
Posted on: July 19, 2010
Restricted play skills are one of the hallmarks of autism. Among the handful of reasons that children on the spectrum have trouble branching out in their play is that many lack ideation, which is necessary for understanding how to interact with new objects.
"Many kids with autism reject novelty," said Lisa Audet, PhD, CCC-SLP, assistant professor in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Kent State University in Kent, OH. "When something is new and they don't have a mental template or schema in their heads for how to engage with the object, they reject it." They prefer to play with only a handful of predictable items.
"Limited ideation results in them doing 'same old'-playing with the same thing all the time," she told ADVANCE. Comfortably stuck in one mode, they don't accumulate a well-rounded knowledge of basic concepts over time.
Many children with autism have motor planning deficits. They have difficulty using their hands to operate and explore toys in a way that most parents expect.
One boy who lacked fine motor skills and had difficulty using his fingers to operate cause-and-effect toys, like a See 'n Say®, only wanted to dump and throw objects, Dr. Audet recalled. His play skills did not evolve much beyond those motions because he didn't have good hand use. "As he got older, it looked more aberrant because you have a 10-year-old who's dumping and throwing like a 2-year-old," she said.
Older children with autism often display play skills that are similar to those of much younger, typically developing children. For example, 18-month-olds often derive great pleasure from filling containers or rolling a ball. Older children whose play skills closely match this age group may have language skills at about the same level.
Restrictive play also could be caused by anxiety. Children with autism often feel uneasy when they are presented with novel objects because they are forced out of their comfort zone. "They play with particular objects as a way of calming themselves, to self-regulate," Dr. Audet said. "Kids with limited ideation don't move to pretend play, where it becomes symbolic, and that parallels the absence of language, which is also a symbolic act."
Many children with autism also have trouble with turn-taking. The two types of reciprocal interactions to be on the look-out for are dyadic, between two people, and triadic, which involve two people and an object. Adults can teach dyadic interactions by singing a song that contains gaps for the child to fill with lyrics or sounds.
"We use strategic wait time and a lot of rhythmic information and melodic intonation to create predictability, which can be helpful in getting reciprocity around something dyadic," said Dr. Audet.
When children are engaged in sensorimotor activities that provide them with movement, such as bouncing or swinging, speech-language pathologists can seize the opportunity to assist them in maintaining the dyadic interaction and reinforce the predictability of a routine.
Only when a child is able to engage in one-on-one joint interactions can clinicians begin to facilitate triadic interactions. Unfortunately, many clinicians start with the triadic events when attempting to increase joint attention and reciprocity. "The triadic interaction can be difficult for kids with autism," she said, "yet so often we start there, especially if the child is older, and doesn't yet understand reciprocity."
To qualify for kindergarten, children need to be able to occupy themselves with a solitary, adaptive activity for at least seven minutes. When working with a child prior to school enrollment, speech-language pathologists and parents must keep this in mind in addition to other social aspects of play, including parallel play, trading and sharing, and cooperative play.
"If we're working on parallel play, we know that imitation is difficult for kids with autism," said Dr. Audet. One way to facilitate imitation is to imitate a child's natural play behavior. For example, a speech-language pathologist can join a child in the activity of filling and dumping when trying to introduce a new tool.
"If a child is putting corn in a bucket and then dumping it, we begin to model so he knows he has a partner," she explained. "In addition to imitating, we work on parallel play by modeling with our own shovel. We then offer the shovel to the child and wait expectantly. The child may pick up the shovel and imitate us. If they don't, we continue to present an exaggerated model of the behavior and continue to present the shovel to the child."
The speech-language pathologist is building on the natural play of filling and dumping and modeling the next level of play.
The first cooperative play skill to teach is sharing. The child has to relinquish control of an object, probably a highly preferred one.
Most children learn to trade before they learn to share. This is important to keep in mind when working with children with autism because they must never be left without anything to keep them occupied as they wait for their play partner to return a toy. Otherwise, they are likely to succumb to frustration and act out.
Clinicians can teach trading by having children play with cause-and-effect toys such as cars or tops. "Give the kids different ones so they trade," she said. "They will get something similar but not exactly the same. Trading becomes important as a steppingstone to learning how to share."
Speech-language pathologists should be supportive so children will request help when needed. Nonverbal cues are a good place to start in providing children with the means to ask for help. Don't rush in to provide assistance whenever a problem arises, however. "Provide a mechanism for them to ask for help, whether it's a picture icon, a voice-output device, a hand-over-hand movement or signing," she said. "We let them know before they get too frustrated with an event that we're there to help. It's really important to read the nonverbal cues that are really subtle."
To spark spontaneous language in children with autism, speech-language pathologists can tap into their knowledge of normal childhood development. For example, typically developing children begin to speak in two-word combinations when they have approximately 75 words in their repertoire. Before attempting to elicit spontaneous speech and to get a sense of what expectations to set, clinicians need to ask themselves how many words are in the child's repertoire, if they are spontaneous words, and whether the words are approximations, imitative or echolalic.
Clinicians often advance too far ahead in treatment. "If children have 25 words in their repertoire and are echolalic, using a five-word sentence like 'I want more cookie, please' is a big jump if we expect that utterance to have true linguistic meaning," said Dr. Audet.
After determining the level of spontaneous language, speech-language pathologists can start building single-word vocabulary to help children reach the 75-word mark. "Begin to work on semantic relations, then reinforce those two-word combinations. When the child says, 'My cookie,' we say, 'Yes, Jimmy's cookie,' versus 'Tell me, 'I want more cookie, please,' and jumping to that rote utterance, which the child is going to comply with if he is echolalic," she said. "We sabotage ourselves if we reinforce echolalia vs. spontaneous language."
A child may need some echolalic chunks to ask for help, protest, or engage in adaptive behaviors, but that's only one prong, Dr. Audet said. The other prong is building up spontaneous vocabulary by reinforcing the use of single words and two-word combinations without making the child produce a complete sentence. "That's like a three-year developmental leap for a child who has a disability," she said. "We wouldn't expect that from a typically developing child."
For More Information
*
Lisa Audet, PhD, laudet@kent.edu
Jason Mosheim is a Senior Associate Editor for ADVANCE. He can be contacted at jmosheim@advanceweb.com.
By Jason Mosheim
Posted on: July 19, 2010
Restricted play skills are one of the hallmarks of autism. Among the handful of reasons that children on the spectrum have trouble branching out in their play is that many lack ideation, which is necessary for understanding how to interact with new objects.
"Many kids with autism reject novelty," said Lisa Audet, PhD, CCC-SLP, assistant professor in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Kent State University in Kent, OH. "When something is new and they don't have a mental template or schema in their heads for how to engage with the object, they reject it." They prefer to play with only a handful of predictable items.
"Limited ideation results in them doing 'same old'-playing with the same thing all the time," she told ADVANCE. Comfortably stuck in one mode, they don't accumulate a well-rounded knowledge of basic concepts over time.
Many children with autism have motor planning deficits. They have difficulty using their hands to operate and explore toys in a way that most parents expect.
One boy who lacked fine motor skills and had difficulty using his fingers to operate cause-and-effect toys, like a See 'n Say®, only wanted to dump and throw objects, Dr. Audet recalled. His play skills did not evolve much beyond those motions because he didn't have good hand use. "As he got older, it looked more aberrant because you have a 10-year-old who's dumping and throwing like a 2-year-old," she said.
Older children with autism often display play skills that are similar to those of much younger, typically developing children. For example, 18-month-olds often derive great pleasure from filling containers or rolling a ball. Older children whose play skills closely match this age group may have language skills at about the same level.
Restrictive play also could be caused by anxiety. Children with autism often feel uneasy when they are presented with novel objects because they are forced out of their comfort zone. "They play with particular objects as a way of calming themselves, to self-regulate," Dr. Audet said. "Kids with limited ideation don't move to pretend play, where it becomes symbolic, and that parallels the absence of language, which is also a symbolic act."
Many children with autism also have trouble with turn-taking. The two types of reciprocal interactions to be on the look-out for are dyadic, between two people, and triadic, which involve two people and an object. Adults can teach dyadic interactions by singing a song that contains gaps for the child to fill with lyrics or sounds.
"We use strategic wait time and a lot of rhythmic information and melodic intonation to create predictability, which can be helpful in getting reciprocity around something dyadic," said Dr. Audet.
When children are engaged in sensorimotor activities that provide them with movement, such as bouncing or swinging, speech-language pathologists can seize the opportunity to assist them in maintaining the dyadic interaction and reinforce the predictability of a routine.
Only when a child is able to engage in one-on-one joint interactions can clinicians begin to facilitate triadic interactions. Unfortunately, many clinicians start with the triadic events when attempting to increase joint attention and reciprocity. "The triadic interaction can be difficult for kids with autism," she said, "yet so often we start there, especially if the child is older, and doesn't yet understand reciprocity."
To qualify for kindergarten, children need to be able to occupy themselves with a solitary, adaptive activity for at least seven minutes. When working with a child prior to school enrollment, speech-language pathologists and parents must keep this in mind in addition to other social aspects of play, including parallel play, trading and sharing, and cooperative play.
"If we're working on parallel play, we know that imitation is difficult for kids with autism," said Dr. Audet. One way to facilitate imitation is to imitate a child's natural play behavior. For example, a speech-language pathologist can join a child in the activity of filling and dumping when trying to introduce a new tool.
"If a child is putting corn in a bucket and then dumping it, we begin to model so he knows he has a partner," she explained. "In addition to imitating, we work on parallel play by modeling with our own shovel. We then offer the shovel to the child and wait expectantly. The child may pick up the shovel and imitate us. If they don't, we continue to present an exaggerated model of the behavior and continue to present the shovel to the child."
The speech-language pathologist is building on the natural play of filling and dumping and modeling the next level of play.
The first cooperative play skill to teach is sharing. The child has to relinquish control of an object, probably a highly preferred one.
Most children learn to trade before they learn to share. This is important to keep in mind when working with children with autism because they must never be left without anything to keep them occupied as they wait for their play partner to return a toy. Otherwise, they are likely to succumb to frustration and act out.
Clinicians can teach trading by having children play with cause-and-effect toys such as cars or tops. "Give the kids different ones so they trade," she said. "They will get something similar but not exactly the same. Trading becomes important as a steppingstone to learning how to share."
Speech-language pathologists should be supportive so children will request help when needed. Nonverbal cues are a good place to start in providing children with the means to ask for help. Don't rush in to provide assistance whenever a problem arises, however. "Provide a mechanism for them to ask for help, whether it's a picture icon, a voice-output device, a hand-over-hand movement or signing," she said. "We let them know before they get too frustrated with an event that we're there to help. It's really important to read the nonverbal cues that are really subtle."
To spark spontaneous language in children with autism, speech-language pathologists can tap into their knowledge of normal childhood development. For example, typically developing children begin to speak in two-word combinations when they have approximately 75 words in their repertoire. Before attempting to elicit spontaneous speech and to get a sense of what expectations to set, clinicians need to ask themselves how many words are in the child's repertoire, if they are spontaneous words, and whether the words are approximations, imitative or echolalic.
Clinicians often advance too far ahead in treatment. "If children have 25 words in their repertoire and are echolalic, using a five-word sentence like 'I want more cookie, please' is a big jump if we expect that utterance to have true linguistic meaning," said Dr. Audet.
After determining the level of spontaneous language, speech-language pathologists can start building single-word vocabulary to help children reach the 75-word mark. "Begin to work on semantic relations, then reinforce those two-word combinations. When the child says, 'My cookie,' we say, 'Yes, Jimmy's cookie,' versus 'Tell me, 'I want more cookie, please,' and jumping to that rote utterance, which the child is going to comply with if he is echolalic," she said. "We sabotage ourselves if we reinforce echolalia vs. spontaneous language."
A child may need some echolalic chunks to ask for help, protest, or engage in adaptive behaviors, but that's only one prong, Dr. Audet said. The other prong is building up spontaneous vocabulary by reinforcing the use of single words and two-word combinations without making the child produce a complete sentence. "That's like a three-year developmental leap for a child who has a disability," she said. "We wouldn't expect that from a typically developing child."
For More Information
*
Lisa Audet, PhD, laudet@kent.edu
Jason Mosheim is a Senior Associate Editor for ADVANCE. He can be contacted at jmosheim@advanceweb.com.
Friday, June 25, 2010
First Iphone application for Speech Therapists.
Smarty Ears releases their first of many to come Iphone Applications for Speech and Language Therapists and parents of children with language and articulation disorders. Mobile Articulation Probes © was released to the public on January, 4th 2010.
MAP main image
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Jan 06, 2010 – Smarty Ears releases their first of many to come Iphone Applications for Speech and Language Therapists and parents of children with language and articulation disorders. Smarty Ears is a publishing company designed to infuse the use of technology in the field of speech therapy.
Mobile Articulation Probes © was released to the public on January, 4th 2010. MAP (Mobile Articulation Probes) is one of the first Iphone Applications in the field of speech therapy. MAP is a practical option for Articulation therapy and evaluation. MAP can be used for therapy as well as to collect additional information regarding a child’s articulation skills during assessment.
With this App Speech Therapists will be able to add an entry for all their students and keep track of their articulation performances. MAP provides accuracy scores for each session. MAP also displays which specific sounds/words were not produced accurately. With MAP speech therapist move to the next level of data tracking because there is no need to count errors on paper- MAP will do it for you.
MAP provides more than 400 words classified by manner of articulation as well as individual phonemes in all positions of the word. All you have to do is add new user, add new session, select which phonemes or class of phonemes you want to target, select which position of the word you are working on and begin session. MAP is the easy way to show parents their child’s progress in therapy.
MAP was designed by Barbara Fernandes,M.S CCC-SLP a Speech and Language Pathologists. She has obtained her Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech and Hearing Association.
Mobile Articulation Probes © is available in English. The release of the Spanish version is scheduled for January, 20th 2010.
For more information visit: www.smarty-ears.com
To purchase this application visit: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobile-articulation-probe ...
# # #
Smarty Ears, LLC (c) 2009 is a publishing company that believes technology can help reduce the gap between language proficiency and language abilities.
For more information visit www.smarty-ears.com
MAP main image
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRLog (Press Release) – Jan 06, 2010 – Smarty Ears releases their first of many to come Iphone Applications for Speech and Language Therapists and parents of children with language and articulation disorders. Smarty Ears is a publishing company designed to infuse the use of technology in the field of speech therapy.
Mobile Articulation Probes © was released to the public on January, 4th 2010. MAP (Mobile Articulation Probes) is one of the first Iphone Applications in the field of speech therapy. MAP is a practical option for Articulation therapy and evaluation. MAP can be used for therapy as well as to collect additional information regarding a child’s articulation skills during assessment.
With this App Speech Therapists will be able to add an entry for all their students and keep track of their articulation performances. MAP provides accuracy scores for each session. MAP also displays which specific sounds/words were not produced accurately. With MAP speech therapist move to the next level of data tracking because there is no need to count errors on paper- MAP will do it for you.
MAP provides more than 400 words classified by manner of articulation as well as individual phonemes in all positions of the word. All you have to do is add new user, add new session, select which phonemes or class of phonemes you want to target, select which position of the word you are working on and begin session. MAP is the easy way to show parents their child’s progress in therapy.
MAP was designed by Barbara Fernandes,M.S CCC-SLP a Speech and Language Pathologists. She has obtained her Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech and Hearing Association.
Mobile Articulation Probes © is available in English. The release of the Spanish version is scheduled for January, 20th 2010.
For more information visit: www.smarty-ears.com
To purchase this application visit: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobile-articulation-probe ...
# # #
Smarty Ears, LLC (c) 2009 is a publishing company that believes technology can help reduce the gap between language proficiency and language abilities.
For more information visit www.smarty-ears.com
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Play Routines In early language development.
By Harriet Englander, MS, CCC-SLP
this article was taken from the ADVANCE magazine
I enjoy working with toddlers and observing their obstinate focus on one activity. When parents referred to a child's favorite toy or pursuit as a fixation, I began to wonder, "Is this a symptom of a speech and language delay, a behavior on the autistic spectrum, or a step in language development?"
When we go into the home, we want to show parents that talking to their toddlers about what they are doing, where they are going, and how they are going to get there during their daily routine is how they can help their children develop language. Parents and caregivers can help toddlers make good progress if they have consistent involvement in their routines of eating, dressing, brushing teeth, going out, and going to sleep.1
The toddlers I work with learn to produce language through shared attention during play routines. Why not repeat the same activity that the toddler feels comfortable with? Letting a child begin the session with a favorite toy or activity can lead to listening, labeling, commenting and communicating.
I began speech therapy with Peter when he was 2-and-a-half and his favorite activity was Thomas the Train. We sprawled on the floor together, putting down tracks and lining up the small cars. Peter could name "Percy," "James" and "Emily" early on, but his communication skills were slow to appear.
A few weeks after we began, we were ending a session on the front steps of his house, playing with small airplanes and waiting for his older brothers to get off the bus. I suggested he say "hi" to his brothers when they approached us. Peter did, and his 6-year old brother looked at me as if I were a magician. "Peter never spoke to me before," he said.
Peter's behavior seemed to be obsessive and uncommunicative, but he was beginning to make eye contact as I talked about what we were doing. He began to indicate preferences: these tracks instead of those, this train instead of that one. His mother watched the progress, and we discussed her busy schedule. She admitted that Peter spent a lot of his day in a car seat. I told her they didn't have to be silent in the car. She could talk to him about where they were going and what they were going to do. She began to ask him to indicate what he wanted to eat. Peter was dialoguing by age 3 and became a talker by 3-and-a-half. He soon was thriving in a pre-K program with rules and schedules, communicating easily and intelligibly.
Lois Bloom, PhD, reminds us, "A language will never be acquired without engagement in a world of persons, objects and events. The motivation for learning a language is to express and interpret contents of mind so the child and others can share what each is thinking and feeling."2
Devin was not yet 2 when I began to work with him. He had a basement filled with toys and liked his kitchen. We played kitchen every session. He allowed me to vary the play as long as the basic sequence remained the same. We had a shopping cart, canned goods, and a doll to sit in the cart for shopping.
We had a stove, pots and pans, and a rotisserie with noise and orange light to prepare the food. We had a tea set, plates and spoons, and a table and chairs to enjoy our "meal." Devin had a feeding problem, but once we established this routine, he began eating the raisins, fruits pieces and crackers that were part of our "meal" as long as we fed the doll first.
Devin developed his own feedback therapy. During our play routines, he pointed and named what he wanted. I clearly and slowly repeated what he had said, he repeated it, and I reinforced it. We completed his early intervention program in a year, moving from silence to single word utterances and jargon and then nearly full intelligibility. He communicated easily with his family.
Real words are embedded in the jargon of children when they begin to combine words. If we pay close attention to their utterance and know the content, we can deduce the meaning, repeat the word or words for them, reduce their frustration, and initiate real communication. If the parent is doing the same, it is a winning situation.3
Other 2-year-olds who needed to do the same activity over and over have done simple puzzles, pushed their miniature cars off a coffee table, and begun each session with the alphabet song. When these toddlers could not talk or communicate, they wanted to do what they could do easily. They created their own play routines. It was easy to do intensive modeling while going along with their preference. Repeating the activity they chose seemed to increase their motivation and led to overcoming language delays.
References
Woods, J.J. (2010). Getting into the family routine: Intervention strategies for early intervention. Long Island University, Feb. 5.
Bloom, L. (1998). Research perspectives: Language development and emotional expression. Pediatrics (Supp.: New Perspectives in Early Emotional Development), 102 (5): 1272-77.
Marshalla, P. (2005). Apraxia Uncovered: Seven Stages of Phoneme Development. Anaheim, CA: Marshalla Speech and Language.
Harriet Englander works in the Early Intervention Program in Port Washington, NY. She can be contacted at hmenglander@yahoo.com.
Copyright ©2010 Merion Matters
2900 Horizon Drive, King of Prussia, PA 19406 • 800-355-5627
Publishers of ADVANCE Newsmagazines
www.advanceweb.com
this article was taken from the ADVANCE magazine
I enjoy working with toddlers and observing their obstinate focus on one activity. When parents referred to a child's favorite toy or pursuit as a fixation, I began to wonder, "Is this a symptom of a speech and language delay, a behavior on the autistic spectrum, or a step in language development?"
When we go into the home, we want to show parents that talking to their toddlers about what they are doing, where they are going, and how they are going to get there during their daily routine is how they can help their children develop language. Parents and caregivers can help toddlers make good progress if they have consistent involvement in their routines of eating, dressing, brushing teeth, going out, and going to sleep.1
The toddlers I work with learn to produce language through shared attention during play routines. Why not repeat the same activity that the toddler feels comfortable with? Letting a child begin the session with a favorite toy or activity can lead to listening, labeling, commenting and communicating.
I began speech therapy with Peter when he was 2-and-a-half and his favorite activity was Thomas the Train. We sprawled on the floor together, putting down tracks and lining up the small cars. Peter could name "Percy," "James" and "Emily" early on, but his communication skills were slow to appear.
A few weeks after we began, we were ending a session on the front steps of his house, playing with small airplanes and waiting for his older brothers to get off the bus. I suggested he say "hi" to his brothers when they approached us. Peter did, and his 6-year old brother looked at me as if I were a magician. "Peter never spoke to me before," he said.
Peter's behavior seemed to be obsessive and uncommunicative, but he was beginning to make eye contact as I talked about what we were doing. He began to indicate preferences: these tracks instead of those, this train instead of that one. His mother watched the progress, and we discussed her busy schedule. She admitted that Peter spent a lot of his day in a car seat. I told her they didn't have to be silent in the car. She could talk to him about where they were going and what they were going to do. She began to ask him to indicate what he wanted to eat. Peter was dialoguing by age 3 and became a talker by 3-and-a-half. He soon was thriving in a pre-K program with rules and schedules, communicating easily and intelligibly.
Lois Bloom, PhD, reminds us, "A language will never be acquired without engagement in a world of persons, objects and events. The motivation for learning a language is to express and interpret contents of mind so the child and others can share what each is thinking and feeling."2
Devin was not yet 2 when I began to work with him. He had a basement filled with toys and liked his kitchen. We played kitchen every session. He allowed me to vary the play as long as the basic sequence remained the same. We had a shopping cart, canned goods, and a doll to sit in the cart for shopping.
We had a stove, pots and pans, and a rotisserie with noise and orange light to prepare the food. We had a tea set, plates and spoons, and a table and chairs to enjoy our "meal." Devin had a feeding problem, but once we established this routine, he began eating the raisins, fruits pieces and crackers that were part of our "meal" as long as we fed the doll first.
Devin developed his own feedback therapy. During our play routines, he pointed and named what he wanted. I clearly and slowly repeated what he had said, he repeated it, and I reinforced it. We completed his early intervention program in a year, moving from silence to single word utterances and jargon and then nearly full intelligibility. He communicated easily with his family.
Real words are embedded in the jargon of children when they begin to combine words. If we pay close attention to their utterance and know the content, we can deduce the meaning, repeat the word or words for them, reduce their frustration, and initiate real communication. If the parent is doing the same, it is a winning situation.3
Other 2-year-olds who needed to do the same activity over and over have done simple puzzles, pushed their miniature cars off a coffee table, and begun each session with the alphabet song. When these toddlers could not talk or communicate, they wanted to do what they could do easily. They created their own play routines. It was easy to do intensive modeling while going along with their preference. Repeating the activity they chose seemed to increase their motivation and led to overcoming language delays.
References
Woods, J.J. (2010). Getting into the family routine: Intervention strategies for early intervention. Long Island University, Feb. 5.
Bloom, L. (1998). Research perspectives: Language development and emotional expression. Pediatrics (Supp.: New Perspectives in Early Emotional Development), 102 (5): 1272-77.
Marshalla, P. (2005). Apraxia Uncovered: Seven Stages of Phoneme Development. Anaheim, CA: Marshalla Speech and Language.
Harriet Englander works in the Early Intervention Program in Port Washington, NY. She can be contacted at hmenglander@yahoo.com.
Copyright ©2010 Merion Matters
2900 Horizon Drive, King of Prussia, PA 19406 • 800-355-5627
Publishers of ADVANCE Newsmagazines
www.advanceweb.com
Friday, April 2, 2010
Baby Wordsworth Babies: Not Exactly Wordy
<i>Baby Wordsworth</i> Babies: Not Exactly Wordy
Tuesday, Mar. 02, 2010
Baby Wordsworth Babies: Not Exactly Wordy
By Alice Park
It's hard to avoid logging screen time of some kind on a daily basis, and that's true even in young children. Babies in the U.S. start watching TV early on, with educational DVDs and television shows designed to encourage early language development in pre-preschoolers.
The question is, Do instructional DVDs actually help babies learn? To find out, researchers at the University of California at Riverside designed the most definitive study of the issue to date. The study used a DVD called Baby Wordsworth (part of the Baby Einstein series), which is aimed at teaching babies new vocabulary words, and assigned a group of 12-to-24-month-olds to watch it daily for six weeks. Turns out, the videos didn't work. There was no difference in language acquisition between children who were assigned to watch the DVD and a control group. (See pictures of kids' books coming to life.)
The results, published on Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, are in line with several other studies. In fact, past analyses have found that infants who watch educational DVDs learn fewer words and score lower on certain cognitive tests by the time they reach preschool than kids who haven't watched the videos. These studies, however, were all observational — meaning that rather than assigning babies to watch videos or avoid them, scientists simply asked parents about their babies' viewing habits and then correlated that information with the kids' performance on tests of word acquisition and language skills later on.
This time, psychologist Rebekah Richert and her team did those studies one better. She randomly assigned two groups of babies to either a Baby Wordsworth or control group, then carefully tracked how many of the 30 target words highlighted in the video the babies were able to learn. The words were those that children would commonly hear around the house, such as table, ball, piano, fridge and chair. Parents were asked to evaluate how many of these words their babies understood and how many they could speak, while toddlers were tested separately for their recognition of pictures associated with the target words. Each of the 96 infants and their parents were followed for six weeks, and were evaluated four times in that period. While all the kids added new words to their vocabulary over the course of the study, watching Baby Wordsworth had no added benefit. (See the top 10 children's books of 2009.)
"We found that over the course of six weeks, the children watching the DVDs didn't learn any more words than children not watching," says Richert.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose studies were the first to dispute the claim that educational DVDs improve babies' language skills, noted the importance of Richert's findings in advancing our understanding of how babies learn — or, in this case, don't learn — language. "The novel thing here is that this is actually the first experiment in the real world using these products to robustly test their claims," he says.
It's not entirely clear why the videos are so ineffective, but there may be two potential explanations. One has to do with the idea that such videos and DVDs overstimulate the brain. Researchers believe there is a critical window during early development in which language skills are acquired and developed; the sounds that babies hear and repeat in this time period are essential to establishing their language ability. And babies are better able to learn these sounds if they hear them from a live speaker (a parent) who engages with them directly and uses language in a repetitive, reinforcing way — where, for instance, an adult and the infant interact with each other and with a new object, as they learn its name. By contrast, a video that provides multiple and different stimulating sounds, but in a passive, one-way flow of information — perhaps overstimulating the brain to the point of paralysis — may fail to engage babies in learning. (This is why nonnative speakers of a language, even if they are fluent, find it difficult to reproduce the same sounds of a native speaker, because they were not trained to hear them as infants, says Christakis.) (See "The Year in Health 2009: From A to Z.")
Another reason videos inhibit word-learning may simply be that they replace precious parent-child time that could be spent learning the same words. If babies are watching a DVD, they are not engaging or communicating with their parents. In Richert's study, her team found that the most learning occurred when parents directly taught children new words by pointing at an object, saying its name and repeating it. In the final session in the lab, the researchers observed parents and their youngsters as they watched Baby Wordsworth together; the children's ability to learn words in these situations was enhanced. "What we are finding in our study is that the DVD itself is not a substitute for that kind of live social interaction," says Richert. "For children under the age of 2, social interaction is key to their ability to learning something like words." (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
Based on the evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended for several years that toddlers under age 2 not watch videos or television, and Richert's findings support that advice. But she notes that it's not an all-or-nothing situation. "Given that media is becoming a consistent aspect of children's environment, there are ways that parents can use these DVDs," she says. "They can use them to sometimes teach children, but they should be aware that without being involved themselves, children aren't likely to learn." As enticing as new technologies may be in improving children's development, there is no substitute for a parent's attention and time.
Tuesday, Mar. 02, 2010
Baby Wordsworth Babies: Not Exactly Wordy
By Alice Park
It's hard to avoid logging screen time of some kind on a daily basis, and that's true even in young children. Babies in the U.S. start watching TV early on, with educational DVDs and television shows designed to encourage early language development in pre-preschoolers.
The question is, Do instructional DVDs actually help babies learn? To find out, researchers at the University of California at Riverside designed the most definitive study of the issue to date. The study used a DVD called Baby Wordsworth (part of the Baby Einstein series), which is aimed at teaching babies new vocabulary words, and assigned a group of 12-to-24-month-olds to watch it daily for six weeks. Turns out, the videos didn't work. There was no difference in language acquisition between children who were assigned to watch the DVD and a control group. (See pictures of kids' books coming to life.)
The results, published on Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, are in line with several other studies. In fact, past analyses have found that infants who watch educational DVDs learn fewer words and score lower on certain cognitive tests by the time they reach preschool than kids who haven't watched the videos. These studies, however, were all observational — meaning that rather than assigning babies to watch videos or avoid them, scientists simply asked parents about their babies' viewing habits and then correlated that information with the kids' performance on tests of word acquisition and language skills later on.
This time, psychologist Rebekah Richert and her team did those studies one better. She randomly assigned two groups of babies to either a Baby Wordsworth or control group, then carefully tracked how many of the 30 target words highlighted in the video the babies were able to learn. The words were those that children would commonly hear around the house, such as table, ball, piano, fridge and chair. Parents were asked to evaluate how many of these words their babies understood and how many they could speak, while toddlers were tested separately for their recognition of pictures associated with the target words. Each of the 96 infants and their parents were followed for six weeks, and were evaluated four times in that period. While all the kids added new words to their vocabulary over the course of the study, watching Baby Wordsworth had no added benefit. (See the top 10 children's books of 2009.)
"We found that over the course of six weeks, the children watching the DVDs didn't learn any more words than children not watching," says Richert.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose studies were the first to dispute the claim that educational DVDs improve babies' language skills, noted the importance of Richert's findings in advancing our understanding of how babies learn — or, in this case, don't learn — language. "The novel thing here is that this is actually the first experiment in the real world using these products to robustly test their claims," he says.
It's not entirely clear why the videos are so ineffective, but there may be two potential explanations. One has to do with the idea that such videos and DVDs overstimulate the brain. Researchers believe there is a critical window during early development in which language skills are acquired and developed; the sounds that babies hear and repeat in this time period are essential to establishing their language ability. And babies are better able to learn these sounds if they hear them from a live speaker (a parent) who engages with them directly and uses language in a repetitive, reinforcing way — where, for instance, an adult and the infant interact with each other and with a new object, as they learn its name. By contrast, a video that provides multiple and different stimulating sounds, but in a passive, one-way flow of information — perhaps overstimulating the brain to the point of paralysis — may fail to engage babies in learning. (This is why nonnative speakers of a language, even if they are fluent, find it difficult to reproduce the same sounds of a native speaker, because they were not trained to hear them as infants, says Christakis.) (See "The Year in Health 2009: From A to Z.")
Another reason videos inhibit word-learning may simply be that they replace precious parent-child time that could be spent learning the same words. If babies are watching a DVD, they are not engaging or communicating with their parents. In Richert's study, her team found that the most learning occurred when parents directly taught children new words by pointing at an object, saying its name and repeating it. In the final session in the lab, the researchers observed parents and their youngsters as they watched Baby Wordsworth together; the children's ability to learn words in these situations was enhanced. "What we are finding in our study is that the DVD itself is not a substitute for that kind of live social interaction," says Richert. "For children under the age of 2, social interaction is key to their ability to learning something like words." (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
Based on the evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended for several years that toddlers under age 2 not watch videos or television, and Richert's findings support that advice. But she notes that it's not an all-or-nothing situation. "Given that media is becoming a consistent aspect of children's environment, there are ways that parents can use these DVDs," she says. "They can use them to sometimes teach children, but they should be aware that without being involved themselves, children aren't likely to learn." As enticing as new technologies may be in improving children's development, there is no substitute for a parent's attention and time.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
News!
Hello to all those who read my blog!(I know there are a few of you)
I have been away for sometime as my family and I have been busy caring for our newborn son Elijah Jacob Daniel and our older son Benjamin Roy Daniel.Elijah was born on the 13th of Feb 2010.
So updates on the blog are going to be slow !
Would love to hear from any of you and also any ideas you have for a post you would like to see or questions!
Regards
Manju
I have been away for sometime as my family and I have been busy caring for our newborn son Elijah Jacob Daniel and our older son Benjamin Roy Daniel.Elijah was born on the 13th of Feb 2010.
So updates on the blog are going to be slow !
Would love to hear from any of you and also any ideas you have for a post you would like to see or questions!
Regards
Manju
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