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.