To Infinity and Beyond - Ep. 058
Are you ready to talk about grammar? Infinitive verbs are early developing, and too often overlooked, but they are critical in early language and cognitive development.
To Infinity and Beyond! explores infinitive verbs in depth, and how they empower communication.
Included in this podcast are:
- Defining infinitive verbs—of course!
- A quick overview of Developmental Sentence Scoring
- Clinical examples of the power of infinitive verbs
- Ideas for teaching
Materials from The Speech Umbrella to help teach infinitives, including an illustrated story from The Free Resource Library
--- Useful Links ---
Developmental Sentence Scoring
Tony Goes Fishing is in the Free Resource Library.
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Episode 58 of The Speech Umbrella podcast. I'm calling today's episode To Infinity and Beyond because we are going to talk about infinitive verbs.
Now don't fall asleep on me, infinitives are actually way more fascinating than you might think. Infinitive verbs have a unique position in the power that grammar gives to language. They can even play into the development of executive function. Every time I prepare a podcast for The Speech Umbrella, I face a Pandora's box of how much information do I dive into. I realize I need to mention this, so that I can talk about this, and so it goes. Today's podcast is another one of those situations where I've got to talk about this so then I can talk about this. In order to talk about infinitives, I want to touch on developmental sentence analysis, commonly called DSS for developmental sentence scoring.
If your college experience was anything like mine, maybe you got really familiar with something like Brown's Grammatical Morphemes, but not DSS. And because I didn't study DSS, I didn't pay any attention to infinitives until recently. If you're not thinking about infinitives with your language impaired clients, you might want to take a second look, it's really opened my eyes. Here's a quick background on developmental sentence scoring.
It was developed by Laura Lee in the 1970s and a few of the reasons she developed it was she wanted a method for quantifying the increasing use of syntactic and morphological structures in the spontaneous speech of children, she wanted to provide information on the normal developmental order of grammatical structures, and she wanted children not to be expected to learn difficult grammatical rules before they had mastered simpler forms. I'm not going to talk about scoring the DSS, that is a hairy process. But I love looking at the normal developmental order. That way I'm not jumping the gun and teaching difficult grammatical rules before simpler ones are mastered. So today we're going to cover, what is an infinitive verb, what does developmental sequence look like via the DSS, some real life examples of what is missing when a child doesn't have infinitives, and what we can do to teach infinitives. Plus I have some resources for you from The Speech Umbrella.
Okay, so what is an infinitive verb? And infinitive usually begins with the word too, and is followed by the base form of the verb or the uninflected form of the verb. Examples of infinitives include to read, to run, to jump, to play, to see, to laugh, to cry, to eat and to go. So that's your basic infinitive. Now, what does the developmental sequence look like via developmental sentence scoring? The DSS is really visual for me. So I'm going to try and draw a visual picture for you. Imagine Brown's grammatical morphemes chart. You're probably all really familiar with that. While that chart extends vertically down with increasing morphemes in each stage and age, the DSS extends vertically and horizontally. Not only does it show increase in complexity as you move down the chart, it also shows what kinds of grammar developed concurrently. The DSS quantifies eight types of grammar. Laura Lee said it would be cumbersome to track everything, she had to pick and choose, and I think she made an outstanding selection.
To help you picture this I'm going to give an example of a vertical and horizontal column. Let's go vertically first. The vertical columns represent increasing sophistication over time. And let's take an example of secondary verbs because infinitives fall under the category of secondary verbs. Early infinitives are wanna, gonna, get a, lemme, let's, like, I want to see. And then the next level is I stopped to play. I'm afraid to look. And then you level up to, I want you to come. I had to go and then you get even more sophisticated and you can use it with get, or be, I have to get dressed. I want to be pushed.
Okay, now let's go horizontally. So the eight grammar types are indefinite pronouns, personal pronouns, main verbs, secondary verbs, negatives, conjunctions, interrogative reversals, and wh questions. So bearing that in mind, what develops more or less concurrently with early infinitives? You've got third person pronouns. He, she, him, her et cetera, regular and irregular past tense, am, are, was, were. The early infinitives that we talk about the gonna, the wanna, and wh questions. Are you starting to wonder if your clients who are working on pronouns or on wh questions are using infinitives? Can they use infinitives? I've got a clinical example of a client who was working on pronouns and other structures that were at the same level as infinitives, but he didn't have infinitives. I wasn't working on them because I didn't realize that he was missing them. After I tell you his story, I think you'll realize why I had to open Pandora's box of DSS. What I've come to realize is what is not there in someone's grammar is as important as what is there.
So this client and I were playing with a play sink that I have. It's a super awesome toy because you have real water and you actually turn it all on and water comes out of the faucet and it was so awesome to him that he really didn't want to share with me, but I was trying to play with him. And so he said, share with Miss Denise. And at that moment I realized what he really wanted to say was I don't want to share. And that's when it hit me, holy hand-grenades, what have I been missing? If he can't say I don't want to, or I don't wanna, what else is he unable to say? I don't want to go. I don't want to play. We know how critical it is to give children a way to say no. And we often talk about that when a child is non-verbal and just learning to speak, or maybe just learning to use an AAC device, give them a way to say yes and no. But think how good finding it is if all you have is no without being able to elaborate on it, like, I don't want to, I'm not going to. A child who doesn't have that is missing a really important developmental stage. And I thought to myself, no wonder some of our clients yell no and how a meltdown, if no is all you have at some point, it's not enough, you've got to be able to elaborate. And of course, infinitives are not all about the negatives. Infinitives are also about talking about what you are planning to do, what you are going to do.
Here's an example of a pretty simple story, but it requires the use of infinitive. This is about a character named Tony. Tony wanted to eat fish for dinner, but he was out of fish and he felt disappointed. So he went fishing, he caught a fish, and then he had fish for dinner. My clients who try to tell this story, but don't have infinitives invariably say Tony had fish for dinner rather than he wanted to have fish. Because they don't have the infinitive, they can't even set up the problem. And the story goes nowhere, it makes no sense. Imagine how our conversation, where our child needed to use infinitives, but didn't have them would go nowhere because they couldn't even begin to express a future plan. And this is where infinitives play into executive function because forward planning is part of executive function.
And if you don't have the language to express forward planning, how is that going to work out for you as you try to cognitively develop the concept of forward planning? Okay. So what can we do to teach infinitive verbs? These are some of the things I've done and they're all really pretty simple. I use dolls and I use puppets and we have them state their intentions. I'm going to, I want to. Pin down the age and the situation of the client, I'll use the early forms, I'm gonna, I wanna, I've gotta. I play at giving directions. I want you to. And we'll play this with a shopping game where I have play food and we'll make a shopping list. And one character tells the other, I want you to buy grapes. I want you to get bananas. I'll also play it with giving directions for just moving around. I want you to touch your nose. I want you to touch your nose and touch your knees and for kids who need to move around, that's really great. Now if you're using an activity board with the child, perhaps you're using pictures to show what you're going to do for that day, you could put in choices and you could help them express. I want to do this. I don't want to do that. We're going to do this. We're not going to do that.
You can also do lots of things where you're playing and shooting and kicking balls and things of that nature. I'm going to throw, I'm going to shoot. I'm going to make a basket. I'm going to kick it. I've got to make it, things like that. And last but not least stories where characters state their intentions at the beginning are awesome. I wouldn't start with infinitives. If a child is brand new to telling stories, I found they need to have a little bit of experience with getting the story structure down and telling some really basic stories. But then when they're ready, you can introduce infinitives into the story structure.
Well that about wraps it up for infinitive verbs. Now you know everything that I know about infinitives. If you're looking for some resources to help you teach this, I've got a few things on The Speech Umbrella. There are the pictures of food that I have in my picnic fun activity, and with that you can build a shopping list and do that shopping activity I talked about. I want you to buy this, I want you to buy that. I've also got the Tony story about Tony wanting fish for dinner. And that is a really rough sketch, but the kids love it. So I'll put that on. And last but not least, I've got pictures of different kinds of movements. Wave your hands, touch your nose, touch your knees, that kind of thing. I use them for several different activities, but you can adapt it to teaching infinitives. I want you to touch your nose. I want you to touch your knees. It's been a huge eye-opener for me, the kind of jump that kids can take in their language once they start to learn infinitives.
And of course that is because when you master the simple, the complex takes care of itself and infinitives start to develop very early in the sequence of developmental language. I hope this podcast has opened your eyes to infinitives. If you haven't paid attention to them before and help you give it a try and let me know how it works out for you.
Thanks for listening and talk to you next time.
