Word Finding for Kids.com

What an interesting idea!  The latest issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (October, 2015) contains a very interesting article entitled, “A Novel Pupillometric Method for Indexing Word Difficulty in Individuals With and Without Aphasia”  by Laura R. Chapman and Brooke Hallowell.  Oversimplified, the researchers looked at changes in subjects’ pupils related to the degree of effort put forth to process single words.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to investigate the effort put forth by children to retrieve words?  If this non-invasive method can be used to measure cognitive effort, we might begin to learn why word finding is so very difficult for certain children. Rather than just look at speed and accuracy of retrieval, we might learn about effort.

I also learned from the article that there is a growing body of evidence to support the idea that age of acquisition of words may be a factor in processing.  Again, could age of acquisition be a factor in retrieval?

So many questions, so much potential for research!  How exciting to think we could find answers to some of these complicated questions.  So, you PhD candidates out there…consider this for a dissertation!

 

Author Affiliations & Notes

A growing body of literature supports the notion that age of acquisition may be a critical factor in single-word processing that is masked by the more commonly used word frequency measures

In summary, results of this study provide preliminary evidence that pupillometry can be used to capture cognitive effort involved in processing easy and difficult single words in people with and without aphasia. To our knowledge, there is no prior published study of pupillometric methods applied to auditory language processing in people with aphasia. Results also are the first to demonstrate differences in the effort involved in processing single words without an additional task, such as naming or lexical decisions

Halloween is coming!  That is probably second in popularity only to Christmas for many of our kiddoes.  Are you already hearing about costumes and the classroom party?  I have posted before about my word finding dialogs: I like to use them for all sorts of goals:  awareness, generalization, and just for fun.  Readers can act out  the scenes themselves.  Non-readers can listen to others  and identify word instances of word finding when they hear “mistakes.”

Adapt as you see fit:

Child 1; Hey, guys, let’s get ready for trick or treat day!

Child 2: Trick or treat day? What’s that?

Child 1: You know, that day when we wear costumes and go trick or treating.

Child 2: Oh, you mean Halloween!

Child 1: Yeah, Halloween. I have a big thingamajig to put candy in.

Child 2: A thingamajig? What do you put your candy in?

Child 1: It’s one of those things on your bed.

Child 2: A sheet? A blanket? A pillow?

Child 1: No, the cover to a pillow…a pillow case.

Child 2: OK, so you’ll put your candy in a pillow case. What are you dressing up as?

Child 1: I have one of those things that wraps around your shoulders…like Batman wears.

Child 2: A cape?

Child 1: Yeah, a cape. A black cape. And I’m going to wear fake hair.

Child 2: You mean a wig?

Child 1: A cape and a wig. And I think I’ll carry a sweeper thing.

Child 2: A sweeper thing? You mean a broom?

Child 1: Yeah, a broom. Don’t you think my costume will be scary? I want to be a

scary old ghost. I mean, a witch. What is your costume like?

Child 2: I’ll have a black cape, too. Only I won’t carry a broom. I’m going to wear a

mask and pretend I have a Batmobile.

Child 1; A Batmobile! You must be dressing up as Spiderman. Oops, I mean Batman!

One of my favorite activities for promoting vocabulary and word retrieval is working on analogies.  I love Analogy Adventure, by Linda Schwartz (illustrated by Beverly Armstrong), available on Amazon.com  (http://www.amazon.com/Analogy-Adventure-Grades-Critical-Thinking/dp/088160173X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444501845&sr=1-1&keywords=analogy+adventure   ) .  Not only does the book present a variety of fun-themed analogy worksheets, but it also teaches what an analogy is and how to write an analogy.

The book is marketed for grades 4 – 8.  I have modified the activities for everything from 3rd grade through high school.  After learning to complete analogies, I like to present additional analogies using vocabulary from the curriculum.

What can you target with analogies?  Word finding, of course.  Vocabulary, multiple-meanings, synonyms, antonyms, categories, higher-level language, the list goes on.  I always ask the kids to explain their answers and tell how the words are related.

My fifth graders spend a lot of time learning the various systems of the body.  The skeletal system provides some tough new vocabulary words:  humerus, phalanges, scapula, etc.  So a dual-focus approach will help them learn the vocabulary and be able to retrieve it.  I try to make as many meaningful connections as I can.   For example, the shoulder blade (scapula) is a wide, flat bone that looks like a spatula.  Spatula is a great cue for scapula.

I have a picture of a child licking a mint to help retrieval ligament.

I use a large construction crane lifting a skeleton (yell-a-ton) to remember cran-i-um. And, of course, Elvis the Pelvis helps us remember pelvis.  A grocery cart precariously sits on the edge of a ledge to connect with cartilage.  We pat our knees to remember pat-pat-pat-patella. We “fill land” by scraping our fingers and toes for phalanges. And please humor us by remembering that funny bone in the upper part of our arm, the humerus.

Be sure to reinforce each syllable and have the child say the word aloud, then in a sentence.  Use Diane German’s technique from the Word Finding Intervention Program.  I summarized it in an earlier post:   http://www.wordfindingforkids.com/an-endorsement-from-the-word-finding-guru/

I’m sure you have other ideas. Please comment on this post or send me an email with your cues.  I will add them to the Grades 3-5 page of cues, as listed above.

Web MD lists 57 conditions associated with anxiety, difficulty concentrating, difficulty finding words and difficulty sleeping. Yikes!  So how do you know if a child has a word finding difficulty or if he or she is experiencing generalized stress?  Obviously that is beyond the scope of a speech/language evaluation.  But if a child has difficulty retrieving words, you can be pretty certain that it will be exacerbated by stress.

A March, 2005, study in the  Journal of Neuroscience found that  ” psychosocial stress impairs memory retrieval in humans and suggests that emotionally arousing material is especially sensitive to this effect.” And Dr. Alison Robinson in  her “Ask the Psychologist” blog described it this way:  “One way that stress can impact us is by temporarily short circuiting our brains. You may have all the faculties for expressing yourself well — a strong vocabulary and a good memory — but under stress your brain short circuits.”  She called it the tip of your tongue phenomenon.

We can help our word finders by identifying those situations that cause them stress.  Just anticipating communicative situations and practicing the expressive language before it is needed can go a long way toward making the communication less anxiety-ridden.

Last week my husband and I were fortunate enough to attend the wedding of a dear friend in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  My word finding strategies served me well as I tried to retrieve some remnant of long-lost Spanish vocabulary.  The term that I kept forgetting was the word for the beautiful stone esplanade along the beach.   I seemed to have a brain freeze every time I tried to talk about the lovely walkway lined with shops, sculptures, and smiling people called El Malecon.  I made a silly connection with the word “malcontent.”  It was definitely not a link with semantics – everyone was friendly and seemingly content.  But each time I got stuck on the word, I just thought of “malcontent” and immediately could retrieve “Malecon”.

Once again, word finding strategies are for everyone!  Teach the strategy to your students and use it for yourself!

Oh, my goodness!  I forgot my #1 tenet about working on word retrieval – plan ahead!  I forgot to post my dialog about spring break.  Because I’m so delayed in posting this, I am using my “post-spring break” version of the dialog. Let’s just pretend I did it on purpose, so you can also target irregular past tense verbs.  They are often tricky for our word-finders.

Use this to review concepts with your students, to help them with awareness, or simply to have fun!  I challenge the kids to explain which of their strategies could help out the “word finder” in the dialog.  I like to modify this and add details for each child.  In fact, the “Eiffel Tower” substitution (see below) was an error one of my fourth graders made when discussing an upcoming trip to Chicago with her family. She loved having it included in the script.  This dialog is relevant for suburban Chicago kids who travel into the city.  Change it to fit the spring break spot most appropriate for your speech kids.

Let the kids  use digital counters and “click” for each word finding error they notice.

Student 1:  What did you do for spring break?

Student 2:  Nothing. It was boring.  We stayed home.

Student 1:  We did, too.  It seems like everyone else went somewhere warm and sunny.

Student 2:  Yeah. I can’t believe we only went into um…um…Shhh…Chicago.

Student 1:  What did you do?

Student 2:  We took the thingie into u….u…Union Station.

Student 1:  The thingie?

Student 2:  The train.

Student 1:  That’s cool.  I love to watch all the trucks; I mean trains. What did you do next?

Student 2:  My mom wanted to take one of those whatchamacallits to the museum.

Student 1:  A whatchamacallit?

Student 2:  You know, a taxi.

Student 1:  We usually walk part way and then take the bus.  That way, we can walk by the really tall, tall skyscraper.

The one that used to be called the Eiffel Tower.

Student 2:  The Eiffel Tower?  That’s in Paris! What’s the name of that doo-hickie?  I never remember what it’s called.

Oh, yeah, the Willis Tower.  We took the esca….elevator to the place you can see straight below to the street.

Student 1:  Yeah, that’s really awesome.  It think it’s called the s-s-s-s-sky deck.

Student 2:  I wanted to go, but my sis- I mean, my brother, always gets scared.

Student 1:  Did you go to the place with all the fish?

Student 2:  You mean the plantatarium?

Student 1:  The plantatarium?  I think you mean the planetarium.  But, no, that the place with all the stars.  I mean the

place with the fish and the whales.   The really big fish tank.

Student 2:  That’s the water, the ocean, them, um…aquarium.  My mom calls it the oceanarium. What a cool idea!  I

love to go there!

Student 1:  Me, too.  But I get really hungry walking around looking at all the sea animals.

Student 2:  My mom promised we could get pizza afterward at that place you write on the walls.

Student 1:  Write on the walls?  Really?  Don’t you get in trouble?

Student 2:  No, they even give you crayons, I mean markers.  Teen-agers always write their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s

names.  It’s called something like jeans…Gino’s East!

Student 1:  Gino’s East?  We’ve been there!  I love their pizza.  It sounds like you had a great time!

Student 2:  Maybe a spring break in Florida, I mean Chicago, wasn’t so bad after all.