Empowering Children with Autism through Natural Language Acquisition - Ep. 97
Ever wondered how to effectively enhance language development in children with autism? The Speech Umbrella's 97th episode is here to illuminate your path! I'm Denise Stratton, and I'll be unpacking the power of child-centered approaches like Natural Language Acquisition (NLA), explaining how it helps build spontaneous and generative language. We'll decode complex terms such as Gestalt Language Processors (GLPs), Analytic Language Processors (ALPs), and Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) using relatable examples from my clinical practice, drawing from my wealth of experience to provide you with practical resources to kickstart this transformative therapy technique.
Embarking on the journey of language development, we'll delve into the critical role of Speech-Language Pathologists in breaking up gestalts and isolating words to ease children's understanding. I'll discuss the significance of 'stage four' in language development and how to recognize the signs of spontaneous language. . This episode promises to be an engaging exploration, perfect for parents and SLPs eager to make a difference in their child's linguistic journey. Tune in, absorb, and let's transform lives one word at a time.
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Communication Development Center
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Hello, welcome to episode 97 of the Speech Umbrella. Today we're talking about a subject near and dear to me, and that's teaching children with autism to develop spontaneous and generative language. I've only known how to do this for a few years, but let me tell you it's dramatically changed how I approach therapy with many of my clients on the autism spectrum.
A dilemma we SLPs often run into is children with autism who use very repetitive and echolalic language. It's hard to know where to go with them because they seem to hit a wall and go no further. I used to wonder if there was something more that I could be doing and now I know there is, and I know how to do it. That's what I'm going to share with you today, it's called NLA or Natural Language Acquisition on the autism spectrum. I love NLA because it's child centered and child led. It builds a foundation of language, it gives these children, all the pieces they need to build generative language. It's about word relationships and not perfect grammar. Parents can do this and it dovetails perfectly with the head-on approach i use for kids on the spectrum.
Here's how we're going to tackle this very big subject. First some definitions. Prepare yourself for acronyms, we seem to like acronyms a lot in the SLP world, probably because so many of our terms are so darn long. Secondly, what to look for when determining a learning style. Then I'll give you a rundown of NLA with firsthand examples from my clinical experience. And finally, I'll give you some resources and suggestions for how to get started.
Be aware I'm presenting NLA from my perspective as I've come to understand it, but I'm not an expert. I haven't been doing this very long. Bear that in mind as you listen. And then if you're interested, get acquainted with Marge Blanc and her work. Okay, let's talk about NLA for our first definition. NLA or natural language acquisition is the term Marge Blanc uses to describe her therapy method. And this is the title of a book she wrote. Blanc developed her method in part on earlier research done by others but wow, has she done a lot to bring this area to the forefront. The next term we need to understand is gestalt language processors, or GLPs. Lately, I've seen references to GLP in many places, so there's a good chance you may have at least heard of it. GLPs learn and use language in chunks rather than one word at a time. If they're on the autism spectrum and they're GLPs they may have great difficulty learning to use spontaneous generative language. Imagine you had a Lego set that came with some pieces already glued together. And you were only able to make certain designs because of that. You would be much less flexible than someone who could use every Lego piece individually to create infinite designs. And that's what language is, we create infinite spontaneous and creative language every time we create a sentence. Typically developing children can also be gestalt language processors, but in most if not all cases, they are able to understand how to create spontaneous sentences. So usually we're talking about autism when we refer to GLPs.
Analytic language processors referred to, as ALPs on the other hand, learn language in the one word at a time fashion, they proceed from one word to two words, and then they start developing grammatical morphemes, much like we were taught in school. Schooling in our country leans heavily on analytical processing when it comes to teaching language. Some children with autism are analytic language processors. Finally, we have dual language processors. who are a combination of GLP and ALP. They can be pretty tricky to figure out. But I'm not going to focus on them today as it's going to be enough today to just dip our toes into the NLA world. The takeaway here is that both styles of learning occur naturally, neither is better than the other, and they both occur in typical and atypical populations. In my experience, a lot of GLP children will have a little bit of analytical processing and vice versa. But the prevailing learning style is what informs my therapy.
Final acronym is DSS for Developmental Sentence Scoring. Developmental sentence scoring is a method for estimating the progress of children in language therapy. It's based upon a developmental scale of syntax acquisition. Okay, that's enough for the acronyms, now let's go on. How do you know if you're working with a gestalt language processor? When I first started exploring GLP, I got a bit confused because it seemed that GLP is were those kids who quoted movie scripts or song lyrics exclusively. I have never seen a client who only communicated through quoting movie scripts and song lyrics, although I have read about them.
It's much more common for me to see children who aren't saying much of anything, but when they do talk they are repeating a greeting, or the same set of words, or they sing a song with lots of words together when usually they are unable to combine many words at all. And this is what gives it away to me. They have much more advanced language when they are repeating.
GLPs may use echolalia to communicate how they feel about situations even if the language doesn't seem to match that situation. The language they pick up on is often tied to emotion. It says if the emotions they felt when they heard the language is what they are trying to communicate when they repeat it.
So, what is NLA all about? How do we start to understand echolalia and how to move these kids to generative language? To help GLPs who are stuck in this mode of echolalia and repeating, you need to know what stage they are in. There are six stages there one, echolalia, two mitigated echolalia, three mitigation of the single word, four beginning grammar and original sentences, five generation of more advanced grammar, and six generation of all sentence patterns.
Let's break these down. Stage one, echolalia. That's repeating whole streams of language taken from their environment. Maybe they repeat what they heard a favorite movie character say, or lines from a song. And these are what we call gestalts. Stage two is mitigated echolalia, they mix parts of gestalts, breaking up longer gestalts into smaller chunks and combining them. Stage three is mitigation of the single word. They isolate single words and begin to create original two word phrases. This stage is super important and super exciting. This is why: stage three is referential language. Meaning, they are looking at a book when they say book. They are referring to the here and now with language that actually represents the here and now, rather than relying on borrowed language. It's their own language. Blanc says you can't spend too much time in stage three. It's the basis for everything spontaneous. It is also where stage one sentence types emerge. So it's the beginning of understanding how words relate to each other and how we communicate concepts. I love stage three. So imagine finally, your lego pieces have come unglued, and you have the power to use each word in any kind of combination you want. It's not stuck together with other words.
In stage four, they generate original sentences and also begin to use grammar. Grammatical errors will occur, and they're wonderful to hear because it means they aren't repeating something that they learned. They're trying to figure out how to use these words on their own and so they get these grammar errors, which typical developing children also have. At stage four, their language more closely follows the path of analytic language processors. And here's where you can start using developmental sentence scoring to track their development.
Stage five is generation of sentences with more advanced grammar and it coincides with the developmental sentence scoring sections four through six. Stage six is fully developed grammar and generation of all sentence patterns and it coincides with developmental sentence scoring sections seven and eight. Is your head spinning yet? My head was certainly spinning when I first learned all about this, it was really difficult for me not to get the NLA stages, confused with the DSS stages. And that's why I'm going to try and refer to the developmental sentence scoring progressions as sections. And just remember that you aren't even concerned with developmental sentence scoring until you get to NLA stage four. And things start to get much easier in NLA stage four. They really have momentum for spontaneous language at that point.
Here's some examples from my therapy, but time doesn't permit me to describe the context of each situation and what I said to them and what they said back to me. I'm just giving you these isolated utterances, but to truly place an utterance in this stage, you do need that context. This is just to give you a taste.
So it was stage one. I was playing bubbles with a client and she got the bubble liquid on her hand and she started singing sticky hands, sticky hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. And that was a pure gestalt. That was just something that she had heard and she was repeating it. And other clients saying the happy birthday song as we were playing with a toy cake. They were both referring to the activity at hand, but that was all, they were able to say about the activity.
And so you might also hear someone who is in stage one repeating an entire gestalt that doesn't really relate to the activity, but they're relating the emotion that they felt to talk about the activity. Now you might also hear some grammatical structures, like it's. It's this it's that followed by whatever noun you want to put in and they say that over and over and over again, and that's also stage one. Stage two gets a little tricky for me because it's breaking up longer gestalts to mix and match them. And most of my clients have had pretty short gestalts to begin with. Here's one example. A preschool client and I were playing with Play-Doh and cookie cutters, and she used the word need constantly. When we're using a heart cookie cutter and the Play-Doh she would say, need yellow, need red, need heart over and over and over again, just those things. And then I said it was time to clean up and she suddenly looked up as if she were electrified and she said, need mama, and she ran out of the room. So that was the first time she had combined need with mama. And you could tell that something had happened in her brain when she did it. Just the way she said it as if she had just made this fantastic discovery.
Here's another example where the client took her gestalt it's and combined it with some great descriptive words. She said, it's a messy baby pig. Now if I didn't know that it was a gestalt for her. I wouldn't have known that this was a stage two utterance, but it was pretty cool that she got messy and baby, along with pig. So you construct to see that these aren't pure examples of this as I absolutely know this is stage two, I absolutely know this is stage one, I absolutely know this is stage three sometimes. Well, stage three is pretty easy, actually, when you're doing single words. But it's okay. It's okay if you don't know exactly. I knew that it was one of her gestalts, but I knew that it was fantastic that she said messy and baby along with pig.
You might undervalue stage three, if you didn't know what to look for. I mean, we're accustomed to counting mean length of utterance. And so a single word might seem like no big deal. But for GLPs, it's huge. It's a 'throw a party and go dance in the streets' kind of big deal. Single words like pig, fish, cupcake, hot. These are all things that I've heard in therapy. And early to word combos, such as this party, mommy eye, are some of stage threes I've heard. They're just doing those stage one sentence types. You know, mommy, eye is possessor plus possession, it's mommy's eye, when we were playing with potato head. This party. These are all things that belong in that category stage one sentence types, which I have a download for that in my free resource library. Don't rush through stage three. If you do, you'll end up coming back to it anyway, so just enjoy it.
Things are really starting to rock and roll at stage four. This is where early grammar emerges. Some recent stage fours that happened while we were playing with animals and water were I swimmed, I drinking water. I'm coming. Duck, get out. So you can hear that those are original sentences. I mean, you wouldn't get I swimmed as a gestalt, right?
My final example is stage five because I don't have any clients who've progressed to stage six. That'd be pretty awesome. But it hasn't happened yet. And in fact, I wasn't focused on working on stage five with this client when he produced this. We were working on stage four, but as so often happens a more complex grammar, started to develop as we kept our focus on stage four. He texted to his previous teacher, I should go to school in August at - and he named his old school. He wasn't sure he wanted to go to junior high, you see, and he found the language to express it. I think that is marvelous. Clients are rarely in a single stage at any given time. There's usually a spread between two and four stages.
Now you might be wondering how in the world to take data, because you cannot be analyzing language samples all the time. So, what I do is when I want to take data, I write down what stage each utterance is in during a single activity. So I might write down a two and then a three and then a four or whatever. And I also write down a few really great things they say, things that show me how their language is developing and that I know what percentage of utterances are generally occurring in each stage. It's okay to make decisions on the fly about what stage an utterance is in. Don't stress out too much.
So, how do you get started? I realized I described everything about Natural Language Acquisition, except what you as the therapist does. And that's because it's been done so thoroughly and so well by others. Marge Blanc has a free introductory course plus more advanced courses, and there's also a course on meaningful speech.com. What you were doing, especially in the first three NLA stages, is modeling how to break up gestalts and isolate words. And once you get the hang of it, it really simplifies your therapy amazingly. And I'll link to all those resources in the show notes.
It's time to wrap things up, but here's a few things I want to mention. In the very early stages of working with a client who is pre-verbal you may not know whether they have GLPs. I have found that if you're not sure, approaching therapy as though they could be often helps and it is never heard.
ALPs and GLPs may learn language differently, but they both need to move through the stages of being referential, of learning early sentence types and of experimenting with grammar. So I propose that sentence strips work for no one, no one learns language that way, whether they be an analytic or gestalt learners or dual processors. ALPs or dual processors who don't have stage one sentence types, need to learn them even if they aren't echolalic. Your end goal is generative spontaneous language that is referential. Some clients won't progress beyond stage four, that's sections one through three on the developmental sentence scoring, and that is okay. You can say a whole lot at that level.
Now, give yourself time to learn this. Your aim is for about 50% of what you say to be a model. But you can say other things too. Spontaneous language is good for you as the SLP too. So don't think that everything you say to the child has to be one of these models, just aim for 50%.
Thanks for listening. And if you work with clients on the autism spectrum, be sure to check out Natural Language Acquisition, it's eye-opening and fabulous. That wraps things up for today. If you want a transcript or links for today's and every other episode, you can find them at thespeechumbrella.com slash blog. Take a minute to browse around my store and sign up for the free resource library. I know you will find something that will help you with your kiddos. Tell your fellow therapist about the podcast, leave me a review and let's connect on social media. I'm dstrattonslp on Instagram and the Speech Umbrella on Facebook. Check out my videos on YouTube too. There is a lot of great stuff under the speech umbrella.
