From Birth to Babble: Prelinguistic Skills to Master Before Words Emerge

 

You have been told to expect your child to use “one word by one year.” Great! Does this happen magically? Are there skills you should be looking for? What strategies can you implement throughout your child’s first year to facilitate their language development? We often expect that children will just “catch on” and begin speaking. For some children, this strategy works; but for many children, they need more support. Sometimes this means seeking a full speech and language evaluation; but other times, you as caregivers can implement simple strategies to help your child gain new skills.

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Echolalia, Echolalia… What Do You Mean?

 

Like most things, the views on echolalia lie on a continuum. They range from considering its use non-functional, to tolerating it, to really accepting and celebrating it. We, as parents, caregivers, clinicians, and professionals, can facilitate further acceptance by understanding language learning differences, embracing echolalia, and educating others! 

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Parent Question: How does developmental therapy support speech and communication skills?

“The initial evaluation team recommended developmental therapy for my child but my concerns are with her speech. How can developmental therapy help support her speech? I thought that it focused on preschool readiness skills?” — Concerned Parent

Developmental therapy (DT) focuses on the whole child and often addresses different areas of development, including speech and communication. DT can often be used to complement and support speech therapy by helping your child learn pre-communication skills. These skills include sharing joint attention, attention span, imitation of gestures and play ideas, and general play skills and are essential in learning how to speak! This blog will explain these skills and how you as a parent can help your child with their pre-communication skills.

Pre-communication skills
Joint attention: Joint attention is when two people share attention with an object or activity. This can be demonstrated by sharing eye contact, using gestures, and/or other non-verbal and verbal communication. While children can learn some skills from toys and objects independently, they absolutely need to be able to share joint attention with another person to learn language and how to communicate with others.

Attention span: In order to learn any new skill, one must have the attention span to attend to an activity. On average, a child is expected to attend to a single activity for – at minimum – one to one-and-a-half minutes per year of age. And as they age, a child should be able to attend to several activities in a row.

Imitation of gestures: Imitation of gestures always comes before imitation of words. It is important for your child to learn that they can imitate what other people are doing! Once your child is consistently imitating familiar gestures (such as waving or clapping), novel or play gestures (feeding the baby a bottle, for example), and “invisible” gestures (this is a gesture that you can do but not see yourself do, such as sticking out your tongue or tugging your ear), we know that your child is on track to using sounds and words to communicate.

Play skills: A child’s “work” is play! It is important for your child to engage in functional play with toys to learn the concept the toys are targeting. Engaging in functional play provides your child opportunities to use language to communicate. Play is also a great measure of a child’s cognition!

How can parents support pre-communication skills?
Joint attention: Engage in a preferred activity that your child has mastered – we want to make sure they can focus on learning the skill of joint attention and not forcing too many cognitive demands at once. For example, if your child does not yet match, you would not use a puzzle for this activity. Activities with lower cognitive demands – such as popping bubbles – is much more appropriate for a joint attention activity (but if your child has mastered matching, feel free to use a puzzle!) After blowing bubbles a few times for your child, pause the activity. Give him or her the opportunity to come to you and show you that they want “more” by using eye contact or gesturing to you what they want. If they only look at or touch the bubbles, bring the bubbles near your face to encourage eye contact. Once they look to you, provide praise and blow more bubbles! Continue this routine as long as your child will tolerate.

Attention span: Toddlers are notorious for having a decreased attention span! Everything is so new and interesting to them, no wonder they want to bop around the room and get into everything! Make sure you create a learning and play space that is conducive to attending to activities. Having a large number of toys available at all times or always having the television can create many distractions for your child.

When starting to work on increasing your child’s attention span, your goal should be to complete one activity – that’s it! An activity with a clear beginning and end, such as a puzzle or book, are great activities to start with. Engaging in symbolic play with a baby doll, for example, would be considered an open-ended activity that can be finished after one minute or ten. And again, you want to choose something that they have mastered so they are not expected to complete an activity that is new or particularly challenging.

Imitation: To work on a child’s imitation skills, you can start by imitating them! If they bang a toy on their highchair, you do the same. Encourage your child to do the gesture again before imitating it again. Once you go back and forth a few times, change the gesture – rub an object on the highchair instead for example. If your child does not imitate this gesture, do it again. If they continue to not imitate this gesture, provide hand over hand assistance to show them exactly how to imitate this gesture.

Play skills: Sometimes, children need to be taught how to play functionally with objects! Just like any other skill, play needs to supported and taught and it is up to the child’s first teacher – their parents – to show them just that. Parents should be modeling appropriate play with toys and encouraging the child to do the same (this is also where those imitation skills come in handy!) Help your child master functional play by setting aside a few minutes every day to provide your child your undivided attention and PLAY!

Questions or concerns?
If you have questions or concerns about your child’s pre-communication skills, please contact us at info@playworkschicago.com or 773-332-9439.

Kimberly Shlaes, MAT, DT
Director of Developmental Therapy Services

Reference:

Teach Me to Talk. (July 30, 2018). Sorting Out the 11 Prelinguistic Skills… Retrieved April 25, 2019 from http://teachmetotalk.com/2018/07/30/sorting-out-the-11-prelinguistic-skills/

Photo Credit: PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Speech Therapy: Debunked

Most people have had some exposure or connection to speech and language therapy, whether it was for themselves, a friend, or a family member. It could be that your child has recently been recommended speech therapy and you are not sure what this will entail. In this blog, I hope to debunk a few common misconceptions regarding speech and language therapy, as well as provide a brief overview of the field of pediatric speech-language pathology.

Common Myths and Misconceptions: Debunked
While it may look to the outside world that we are simply playing with toys and games, there is a method to this play-based madness. Our job is to find out what motivates your child and use it to target their therapy goals. When your child is a toddler, this might mean making a cow jump over a barn. While that isfun, your speech therapist may be working on improving your child’s engagement and ability to imitate play-actions, which will hopefully lead them to imitating sounds and words. A population that is often thought of when discussing speech therapy are those with disfluencies, or those who stutter. This is true but is a small percentage of children worked with for a general speech therapist. Articulation therapy is another familiar area, as many of my friends remember being pulled-out of class to play Candyland and work on speech sounds as a child.  Although I do own Candyland and use it semi-regularly, there is so much more we, as speech-language pathologists, do to help improve your child’s communication skills.

What is speech and language therapy?

Variety is the spice of life, and as speech therapists, we get a good taste of this! Speech therapists have a broad scope of practice when it comes to the pediatric population. Below are a few of the most common areas a speech therapist might help your child with.

  • Articulation/Phonology:The actual sounds your child makes to create words.
  • Motor planning:Your child’s ability to plan and execute the fine motor movements required to speak in words, phrases and conversation.
  • Language:The words and phrases your child both usesand understands.
  • Feeding:This involves oral-motors skills like sucking, chewing and swallowing. Also, the sensory processing of different textures, tastes and consistencies.
  • Voice:Your child’s vocal quality. Is it appropriate for a child their age and size or is it breathy or hoarse?
  • Fluency:The way your child’s speech flows.
  • Pragmatics:Your child’s social communication skills, such as making eye-contact, initiating communication with peers, and taking conversational turns.
  • Advocacy: Your child could benefit from additional therapies that you may not be aware of. Your speech therapist can help advocate for your child to ensure they get the best possible care from a qualified team of providers, if necessary.

If your child is demonstrating difficulty in one or many of the areas above, consider contacting one of our speech-language therapists.

Questions or concerns?

If you have questions or concerns about your child’s communication or feeding skills, please contact us at info@playworkschicago.com or 773-332-9439.

Ana Thrall Burgoon, M.S., CCC – SLP 
Speech-Language Pathologist

Photo Credit: Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash