Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose

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Well, not really... When played competitively, Scrabble can be as complicated as chess, and as cutthroat and If you are like me, and have been an admirer of Temple Grandin over the years, you would never doubt that her “hard drive” surpasses most, and that her public speaking skills have become very sophisticated. Her assurance to us that the process of “recombining” language continues well into adulthood is particularly validating to those of us who realize that the idea that our kids’ language becomes hard-wired by age 8 is simply not true! Yes, with “typical” language development, kids’ heads have all the rules of grammar by then. New learning seems to be “inhibited” by the rules they already know.

As we conclude this story of Dylan, and complete the progression of Natural Language Acquisition on the spectrum, we should recap the journey. In three years, from the age of 4 to 7, Dylan moved from using language gestalts (Stage 1), to mitigating them and recombining them (Stage 2), isolating single words and beginning to generate original phrases (Stage 3), developing simple sentences with a variety of pronouns and verbs (Stage 4), using a variety of verb tenses and phrase relationships (Stage 5), and forming complex sentences with more advanced verbs and conjunctions (Stage 6). letter carries a number value, and at the end of the game, these numbers are added up to reveal your total Welcome to our third installment in the continuing story of Natural Language Acquisition on the autism spectrum! In this edition of our column, we will take you through the “generative” steps in this process…and, finally, language development will begin to look more like what you thought it would! winner. You can also look for existing tiles in play to help play a word with a suffix or prefix to get

Learn the common 3 letter and 4 letter hooks. Hooks are when you take a word, add a letter to it, and create a new word. For example, ALE is a word, and so is KALE. Thus, you can create any word with a K in it, as well as a score for KALE in games like Scrabble or Word Feud. will find new words for the letters you have entered and from there you can see what the word means, Cheat for a little bit. Seriously! Using one of our word scramble tools will allow you to see the possibilities. Eventually, you will become better and will no longer need to cheat. (at least not that often)

Now, we recognize echolalia as a part of a picture of ASD, and we tend to include it in our descriptions of our kids. Unfortunately, however, we don’t really seem to know what to do with it! We all but ignore it when we are with our kids, silently hoping it will just stop. In the meantime, we usually try hard to replace our kids’ language “gestalts” with more typical-sounding language, using phrases that sound more “normal.” With variable success, we have taught our kids vocabulary words and scripted sentences that they can access on their own – sometimes only after years of prompting and drills in generalization. We introduced two children, Will, 14, and Dylan, 4 (called “Daniel” in column one), to illustrate the extremes…and consistencies…of the process. I say “extremes” because while both children made excellent progress, Dylan moved from Stage 1 to Stage 3 in about a half year, and Will has not done so yet, after a year. And, I say “consistencies” because their process is basically still the same! While some things were easier for Dylan (he had less language to mitigate from, less language to find the commonalities among), some are easier for Will (his articulation is better and people understand him more often; he is familiar with a wider variety of language and so “generating” language, when he is ready, will not be so foreign). These low-frequency letters are some of the greatest game-winning tools in the game. And remember as Jimmy Holmes claiming to be a long-lost family friend of the Winslows turns out to be much closer when Jimmy tells Carl that his name is Jimmy Baines, Harriette and Rachel's father, who walked out on them years earlier.It wasn’t like this six months earlier, however. Bevin used “movie talk,” as his mother called it, all day long, every day. Bevin’s family was understandably tired…tired of hearing video dialogue repeated at fast forward speed, without any indication that Bevin meant any of it to be communication. With this PowerPoint, you can play fun literacy-based games where children see how many words they can make from the letters given. The longer the word, the more points are awarded. We in the autism community are used to thinking of autism as a continuum…but we’re not so used to thinking of ASD as part of a larger continuum that encompasses all learners. Educators like Jeffrey Freed view it this way, however, and consider all people on a single continuum, with those labeled “autistic” far to the right side. As he says, “Autism is found at the extreme right end of my continuum; it’s the most pronounced form of hypersensitivity and right-brainedness.” Indeed, Temple Grandin, in her endorsement of the book, wrote, “This book could help a lot of creative thinkers…make it through an educational system that is run by linear thinkers.” (While Freed does not include Aspergers learners on his continuum, we might extrapolate. As children, they meet language milestones at the expected time, but their language complexity outstrips its social application. Although Freed includes what he calls “word salad” on the extreme left end of his continuum (run-on verbage that extremely left-brained people are capable of), those of us in the autism community might consider that Aspergers might also reside on the left side of Freed’s continuum line.) Some children who are four years old have begun some mitigating, isolating the parts of the gestalts they can actually say clearly. Depending on a child’s speech skill, it is possible to move on to Stage 2, 3, and even 4 with a little help. After all, little boys do this all the time, and some young ASD children are happily coming up with their own original sentences at Stage 4 or even higher. If your child’s language does not sound “stilted” and forced, you have probably found your child’s level.

During our sixth month, Dylan was producing far less-colorful language, in general, but it was almost all “transparent,” and easy for familiar partners to “read.” Following is a short excerpt from a session during that time. The two clinicians are labeled C1 and C2: When Colin Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, Campbell was thrown headlong into a grief so deep he felt he might lose his mind. He found much of the common wisdom about coping with loss—including the ideas that grieving is a private and mysterious process and that the pain is so great that “there are no words”—to be unhelpful. Drawing on what he learned from his own journey, Campbell offers an alternative path for processing pain that is active and vocal and truly honors loved ones lost. Peters, Ann, The Units of Language Acquisition (1983), electronic version at www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ann, 2002.

The animation and language of movies make them a hard act to follow. Fortunately, real life provides the motor experiences our kids crave, and people who know how to make them fun! Our play had to be active and exciting, and our language had to be delivered with enthusiasm and all the theatrics we could muster. Predictable, “transparent,” developmentally appropriate language can be deadly-dull, unless we make it otherwise! We wanted to compete successfully with Hollywood, so we created extremely fun, movement-based experiences (think, “sensory integration”), that just happened to include basic sentence forms like, “Let’s…”, “Hey, it’s…”, etc. Somehow we did it, because a few months later, Dylan routinely extracted these types of phrases from our language, and produced his own recombinations! His mother’s fierce and bruising ambition instilled in him an overwhelming drive to leave his mark upon the world. His father, a revered high-school English teacher who was timid outside the classroom, introduced him to the rich world of literature—and also passed on to him his doubts and insecurities. Freedman retraces his intellectual formation as a student, educator, scholar, and leader, from his early?obsession with book collecting through his undergraduate years at Harvard and his professional training at Yale Law School. This same passion for language and ideas defined Freedman’s leadership at Dartmouth, where he deftly countered lingering anti-Semitism, fought entrenched interests to open the way for women and minorities, reformed and revitalized the curriculum, and boldly reconceived the school’s campus. Dylan continued his steady language progress for another half year, and at the time of his dismissal, Dylan was speaking with far greater accuracy, and was regularly reformulating sentences to make them more understandable to his listeners. A few examples from that time include: