Word Finding for Kids.com

What does self-advocacy look like?  How can we help our students be their own best advocates regarding their word finding difficulties?

I have repeatedly stated that word retrieval needs to start with awareness.   If a child (or an adult, for that matter) is going to be a more effective communicator, he or she needs to be aware of the issues that are interfering for him or her.  So let’s assume that our speech friend has developed an awareness of his difficulties.  He has learned strategies to help himself retrieve words more efficiently, and has learned compensatory strategies for those words that are escaping him.

Now he needs to advocate for himself.  Even a preschooler can learn to ask for a clue or ask for a choice.  He can say, “I need a hint” or  “Can you give me a choice?”  As kids get into elementary school, they  are sometimes sensitive about revealing their weakness.  So a parent or an SLP can go with the child to talk to his teacher and develop a nonverbal signal that means, “I know the answer, I just need a minute.”  It’s very intimidating for a child to ask the teacher for accommodations;  I wouldn’t expect him to do this without support.

A child with a documented word finding difficulty that interferes academically should qualify for accommodations in the classroom and on testing.  Here are some I have found useful and have written into IEPs:

wait time for oral responses; extended time on tests
cueing with initial sound or syllable
multiple choice, word banks (recognition tasks as opposed to recall)
pre-teach vocabulary
signal before calling upon (nonverbal or verbal)

I ask for the teachers’ lesson plans and study guides.  Present new vocabulary ahead of time.  Give the child an overview so he understands where this information fits into the unit.

In-service your teachers and support staff about word finding.   A child can then go to his teacher and explain,  “I have a problem with word finding.  There are many times I know an answer, but I can’t find the words to express it.”  In elementary school I would expect the child to be accompanied by his SLP to a meeting with his teacher to help explain the accommodations and strategies that are most helpful.  As he reaches middle school, he may be able to do this himself.  Don’t forget the support staff that interact daily with your students!  Teachers’ aides/paraprofessionals are an important part of the team.

Direct remediation is important for a child to be successful despite a significant word finding difficulty.  But so are accommodations and self-advocacy.  Create an atmosphere of success!

The real March Madness is that it’s March 23 and Chicago’s getting up to 6″ of snow this morning.  Are you kidding me???  It’s a good day to sit inside and post a message to you!  In case you’re on another planet, we are in the throes of the Big Dance, aka March Madness, aka the NCAA tournament.  There are so many acronyms and figures of speech being thrown around that it makes an IEP conference positively easy to understand.

I love the “In de Annapolis” promo on TV this week.  Most of our speech kids don’t need a phonemic cue for “Indianapolis,” and likely only a child from Maryland would find Annapolis easier to retrieve than Indianapolis. But it serves as a reminder to choose cues that are meaningful to the individual child.  Ask your speech kids the names of their siblings, relatives, and pets.  If Joey has an “Aunt Sarah,” then “Sarah” is a good cue for “Sarajevo.”  But if he knows no one named “Sarah,” then the cue may not be as helpful. One of my 5th grade friends has an uncle named “Phil,” so the image of his Uncle Phil sucking a fragrant mint is a great cue for “filament.”   Remember that retrieval is determined by recency of use and frequency of use.  Find cues that are relevant.  Then repeat, repeat, repeat.

By the time you come up with cues for the Sweet 16 teams, the tournament will be down to the Elite 8 or the Final Four.  Maybe it’s time to focus on curriculum words instead!

Everyone can benefit from learning word finding strategies.  You don’t need to be diagnosed with a word finding difficulty.  I always remind kids that everyone has word finding problems:  their parents, their teachers, their SLPs….everyone!

One of my favorite word finding stories comes from my dad.  To appreciate this story, you need to know the context of the 60s:  there were Standard Oil gas stations, Texaco, Gulf, Skelly, Clark, Esso, DX, Humble….All sorts of service station names.  Of course, you didn’t fill your own tank.  Your gas was pumped for you and the the windshield washed, but I digress.  My dad always used word associations to remember new acquaintances’ names.  He came home one afternoon, laughing at his own faux pas:

He went into a meeting with his new secretary (that isn’t a politically-correct term, either!).  He remembered that her name was the name of the local service station.  So he introduced his new secretary to the team as “Mary Skelly.”  She discretely turned to him and reminded him that her name was “Mary Clark”!!  He never forgot her name after that!

We ALL can benefit from word finding strategies!

So you’ve given the Test of Word Finding – 3rd Edition, you’ve give the Test of Word Finding in Discourse, and you’ve collected information from parents, teachers, and the student himself/herself.  Word finding in single words is within normal limits, but the child struggles significantly in conversational speech and classroom narratives.  What to do?

There is not a lot of research on this topic.   Bottom line is that teaching individual words has not been shown to significantly improve word finding in spontaneous speech, and more research is needed about the long-term efficacy of intervention.  Phonemic cuing for individual words has been shown to be effective:  http://cdq.sagepub.com/content/23/4/177.short.    A 2011 article  in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders supported the value of semantic therapy (secondary students were taught words in categories)   http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-6984.2011.00073.x/abstract.  But discourse?  There isn’t much research out there.

These are the ideas I have found to be effective.  Again, there is not published research to back this up.  But many years of intervention have shown the following are helpful: (1) try to anticipate the vocabulary a student will need.  At the very least, this will reduce anxiety about retrieving words in discourse; (2)  always extend the learning by having a child produce his own sentences using the word, (3) provide a framework or outline to help structure classroom responses.

Discourse, or connected speech, is where I think strategies are important.  I always remind kids that we can’t possibly anticipate all the words they are going to need.  So what do you do when you get stuck?  Visualize the context:  if you are stuck on a baseball word, think of yourself at a game.  See the field, see the players, see the scoreboard.  Think of words associated with that topic:  team, coach, homerun, shortstop, mitt, etc.  Encourage describing objects and activities using their salient characteristics.

Remember that frequency of use and recency of use determine ease of retrieval.  So try to anticipate the discourse your student will need for the classroom or for his social language.  Role-play and practice those conversations before they are needed.

What techniques have you found to be effective?  Please share!

Can we improve word retrieval by improving attention?  I met some lovely young women at ISHA who are trying to answer that question.  They are students at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa.  Their research, presented as a SIRCA (Student Initiated Research & Clinical Application) poster, found an increase in naming abilities for an 86 year old post-stroke woman who participated in Lumosity (http://www.lumosity.com/).   Before you yell at me and say, “Wait!  This is a victim of aphasia!  This is not a child who has a specific word retrieval difficulty!”  Yes, I know!  And I know that the theoretical models for word finding in children are different than those for the localized brain trauma in aphasia.  But I think we can learn from both models.

The research highlighted 2 findings following intervention with a Lumosity program designed to increase attention:

(1) Their patient was able to name more items in an abstract category, and

(2) Their patient demonstrated increased accuracy during the computer activity, suggesting “an improvement in attentional abilities.”

I contend that children benefit more from word finding therapy (or any kind of speech/language therapy, for that matter) when they are engaged and involved.  If computer-assisted intervention can supplement traditional therapy, improve attention, and provide motivation, shouldn’t we be open to it?  More research is needed.  But this research is pointing us in the right direction.  Kudos, ladies!

I had a great time in Iowa City last weekend  for a fun reunion.  A lovely young woman gave my friend and me a tour of the campus, including a walk across the Iowa River to the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic.  I have lots of happy memories of riding my bike across the river to the Clinic.   Of course, other people were interested in seeing Nile Kinnick Stadium!  Maybe the speech clinic isn’t a big tourist draw???  I didn’t even think to take a picture of the clinic, but this is a picture of ice breaking up on the river.  It made a lovely collage.

I had never heard of “word finding” or “word retrieval” in graduate school.  That’s another thing special about SLPs:  they are always learning new things.  I was so very encouraged to hear the enthusiasm in the voice of an undergraduate:  the field of speech-language pathology is in good hands for the future!

I enjoyed another trip to DC last weekend to visit my daughter and  one-year old granddaughter.  Such fun to see language emerging in real time! We had a fun brunch at the Union Street Market, where I spotted t-shirts bearing a word finding cue for the name of the coffee shop.  Can you figure it out?

Peregrine!  pear-uh-grin… I won’t forget the name of the shop.  Peregrine Espresso Coffeehouse.  Aren’t they clever?

 St. Patrick’s Day will be here soon!  I have found the St. Patrick’s Day vocabulary that is hardest to retrieve includes:  Leprechaun, shamrock, and Ireland.  See the silly leopard spots on the leprechaun’s face?  That is to reinforce the connection between “leprechaun” and “leopard.”  The silly leprechaun sitting on a rock is named “Sam.”  So think “Sam on a rock,” but say “shamrock.”  The kids who are very familiar with McDonalds may connect more with “shamrock shake.”

The Emerald Isle is “Ireland,” connected with “iron land.”  More and more kids haven’t seen much of an iron these days.  I may need to come up with a more familiar cue!  Maybe Iron Man is more familiar than a household iron.  Whatever is meaningful to the kids is what we need to use.

Whatever vocabulary your kids need, practice it now so they will be able to retrieve it before March 17!

So who was Casimir Pulaski?  A Polish nobleman who fought in the Revolutionary War, and is credited for saving the life of George Washington.  You may never have heard of him if you live outside the Chicago area, but Casimir has become a favorite of Chicago-area school children because many of them have the first Monday of March off school to commemorate his life.

His name (pronounced pull/las’/key)became one of my favorite word-finding cues.   I was invited to share my research at a school board meeting a few years ago.  I decided to teach the board members my WF cue:  “pull the last key.”  I pulled out my keys, went around the room, and asked each board member to “pull the last key.”  None of them have forgotten Casimir Pulaski’s name since!

This is the 3rd of 3 posts about differential diagnosis in word finding.  After listening to Dr. Diane German at the Illinois Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention last week, I decided it was time to brush up my skills on targeting therapy for specific types of word retrieval clients.  Any mistakes are my own!

Type 3 word retrievers are the “twist of the tongue” clients.   They partially retrieve the word for which they are searching, and those multiple syllables get messed up.  Do you remember the term “spoonerisms”?  I would imagine those are largely “twist of the tongue” errors.   These kids know the word for which they are searching, but there is a glitch in accessing the phonological features of the word.   For some reason, not all the sound units of the word are retrieved.  These kids do NOT respond to an initial syllable cue.    Their responses tend to be slow and inaccurate, and the response is an approximation of the target word.  Errors occur more on lower frequency, less familiar words and words that don’t have many phonological neighbors (“less dense” neighborhoods).

Some examples:  evelator for elevator, prccidate for predicate, momentary for monetary.

In oral reading, “twist of the tongue” word finders are likely to err on lower frequency words, yet words with common phonological patterns.  This was an unexpected result in Dr. German’s study.  Perhaps this is because a child retrieves only an incomplete phonological representation of the word, and it competes with a similar word.  It is important to remember that tests of oral reading are actually measuring retrieval.  To truly understand a student’s reading skill, his silent reading should be assessed with multiple choice or “show me” tasks.

These are the students who benefit most from segmenting word into syllables and associating a phonemic cue with the “evasive” syllable. Try to associate an easily-retrieved, simple word with the part of the word on which the student struggles.  For example, to reinforce “territory,” I use “tear it/tore it” and have the students tear a piece of paper as they say, “tear it,” then “tore it.”  For “ligament” we use “lick a mint.” First break the word into syllables and reinforce saying each syllable.  Then add the cue, followed by repeating the entire word and using it in a sentence.  Dr. German’s procedure from the Word Finding Intervention Program – 2 is very specific: https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/an-endorsement-from-the-word-finding-guru/.

Check out my list of cues (“Vocabulary List of Mnemonic Cues”) at the top of this page, or go to grade-level lists:

https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/preschool/

https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/k-2/ 

https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/3-5/

https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/middle-school/

https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/high-school/

There is also a page with holiday vocabulary   https://www.wordfindingforkids.com/vocabulary-list/holiday-vocabulary/

Many of you have great mnemonic cues for difficult vocabulary.  Please email me (jan@wordfindingforkids.com) or comment on this post with your ideas!  I would very much like to expand the database so we can all benefit from the cues.