Language

Speech Talk 3: Raising Awareness of Language Learning Impairments (RALLI)

4 March 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

How common are language impairments? What does a language impairment actually look like in conversation? How do language impairments affect children and adults at school and at work? Where can people get help to find a diagnosis and treatment? What are some practical strategies and tips teachers and parents can employ to help kids with a language delay to reach their potential?

All excellent questions, especially from parents who are worried something might be wrong with their child’s language development.

In 2013, a group of UK-based speech-language pathologists, academics, teachers and – most importantly – children with language impairments and their families, collaborated to create the fantastic RALLI YouTube Channel. The channel is stocked with great videos answering these – and many other – questions.

I suggest starting here with Professor Dorothy Bishop’s excellent overview.

A full list of videos appears here.

The videos are short, informative and practical. They tackle the hard realities of language impairments head-on. They debunk myths and prejudices, demonstrating, for example, that children with language disorders are not lazy, stupid or disobedient. And they shine a bright light on a “hidden disability” that is more common the autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia.

What I love most about the videos is the opportunity to hear from the children themselves. Watching Stephanie, Seb and the other children tell their stories – of the obstacles they’ve faced and the progress they’ve made with the right help – is immensely inspiring.

Banter Speech & Language

Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).

FAQ: What’s the difference between speech and language?

26 February 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

A mum (not my own) asked me this question recently. She wanted to know why I’m called a Speech-Language Pathologist. “Isn’t that redundant?,” she asked. “Aren’t speech and language the same thing?”

Having assessed and treated speech and language disorders as separate beasts for so long, it took me a while to think about how best to respond. It was – and is – a very important question.

1. Speech and language are not the same thing

Language is the method humans use to communicate with each other, often involving words and symbols used consciously by a group in a structured or conventional way. Languages can be spoken, signed and/or written. We are “wired” for oral language – almost as if it’s an instinct. Language is one of the key ways we differ from other primates. It is an important element in what makes us human.

Speech is the expression of thoughts and feelings by humans through articulated sounds that come out of our mouths and noses (with help from our cranial nerves, lungs, vocal chords, throats, soft palates, teeth, facial and neck muscles and tongues). Speech is one way that we express language.

(Cute fluffy bunnies can neither speak nor use language (with the exceptions of Peter Rabbit, Roger and the Velveteen Rabbits as well as the cast of Watership Down) – though we may just be splitting hares…)

2. Speech and language problems don’t always happen together

For example:

a child or adult may have normal language skills – she may understand what others are communicating and communicate her thoughts and feelings fully through signs, symbols/pictures or in writing – but be unable to speak clearly or fluently, e.g. because of a cleft palate, apraxia of speech, dysarthria, stutter or other disability; or

a child or adult may have the physical ability to speak clearly, but have limited language skills that make it hard to communicate with others, e.g. because of specific language impairment or as a result of a stroke.

3. Problems with speech development can sometimes affect language development and vice versa

For example:

a child who can make only a few sounds may struggle to communicate with others. A child who can only say /b/ and /m/ and a few vowels will find it difficult to ask for daddy’s watch, although she may compensate with gestures, such as pointing; and

a child with a vocabulary of less than 50 words may not have much opportunity to practice or master some of his speech sounds, which may in turn affect his intelligibility.

What do speech pathologists do?

Banter Speech & Language

Speech Talk 2: Patricia Kuhl – the linguistic genius of babies

21 February 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Dr Patricia Kuhl has more accolades and titles than Queen Victoria. Among her many achievements and roles, she is a co-director at the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at Washington University.

Dr Kuhl studies early brain and language development – and by early, we mean really early. Her research tells us a lot about language – and not just about the development of language in infants. Watch her talk here:

Here are some of the key ideas we took away from Dr Kuhl’s talk:

To preserve a language, you need to speak it to babies, not adults. (This comment reminded us of Dr Pinker’s statement that linguists know a language is dead when it is spoken only by adults.)
A critical period exists for humans to acquire a new language efficiently – after 7 years of age, our ability to do so declines systematically.
Babies younger than 12 months old are “citizens of the world”: they can discriminate all the sounds in every language. Adults can’t do that. We’re “language-bound” to our mother tongue (or mother tongues for bilingual children).
As babies listen to their parents, they are (unconsciously) taking statistics on the speech sounds used by their parents. At around 1 year of age, babies gradually lose their ability to discriminate all speech sounds in all languages and zero in on the speech sounds used in their home language(s).
By exposing US-born babies to Mandarin spoken by a Mandarin-speaking therapist for short periods during the first year of birth, babies of English-speaking parents maintained their ability to discriminate speech sounds native to Mandarin speakers.
Interestingly, results were not as favourable when the children were exposed to an audio recording in Mandarin or by watching TV. It seems the presence of a real human being is required – food for thought in these days of iPads and Nickelodeon.

Banter Speech & Language

Speech Talk 1: Steven Pinker – on language

19 February 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Steven Pinker is one of our favourite language scientists. Although he has his critics, he doesn’t mask his thoughts with academic jargon and impenetrable prose. You know where he stands, even if you disagree with some of his more “hard line” views on things like Universal Grammar and innateness. He’s also not afraid to change his mind when persuasive evidence emerges to challenge his original position.

We first came across Dr Pinker’s work in his popular science book, The Language Instinct. His writing is crisp – at times irreverent – and he tackles complex, controversial topics in a highly readable and entertaining way. In particular, Dr Pinker’s colourful use of metaphor allows him to make very abstract concepts concrete. It’s no surprise that he’s considered a good friend of students. His books are a great introduction to linguistics, language and speech. You can read more about him here.

Here’s a talk Dr Pinker did for TED back in September 2007. In parts, it’s a little more dry and technical than some of his mainstream writing. But it’s about a fascinating topic: the relationship of language to thought, and what language can reveal about human nature.

Key ideas and images we took away from this talk include:

language as a window to understanding human nature;
the verb as a chassis of the sentence;
the sentence as a container of thought;
the distinction between language (including an individual language like English) and “mentalese” (the stuff of thought);
the importance of the verbs “to go” and “to have”;
intelligence as a repertoire of concepts and a process of metaphorical abstraction, enabling people to go from using language to talk about rocks, tools and animals in plain sight to abstractions like space, time, force, science and law; and
using Alan Fiske’s work on four different uses of language in relationships as a framework for interpreting human behaviour, and for explaining the awkwardness we feel when there is a mismatch.

Banter Speech & Language

Jack and Jill and that hill

19 February 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Son 2 came home from his second day of school (okay, this was a couple of weeks ago) with this fine work:

I love the look of joy in the kids’ faces as they set off on their trip by the emerald light of the smiling sun, then the look of terror in Jack’s face as he toboggans down the hill, with his sister trailing and wailing behind him. It captures perfectly the casual horror we find in some of the best nursery rhymes we sing to our kids.

Most of us will recall that Jack’s bleeding noggin was patched up with vinegar-and-brown paper (ouch!). But I’d wager not many of us were taught poor Jill’s fate.

How was it Jill’s fault? Was Jack pushed?

JACK AND JILL

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To draw a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot
As fast as he could caper;
Went to bed to mend his head,
With vinegar and brown paper.

Jill came in, and she did grin
To see his paper plaster;
Mother, vexed, did whip her next
For causing Jack’s disaster.

Images: http://tinyurl.com/kgb5mhh

Nursery rhymes sung with an Australian accent

Banter Speech & Language

Do we spend too much time on rhyming books? What else should we do to prepare pre-schoolers to read?

18 February 2014 by David Kinnane Leave a Comment

Duck in the Truck
The Cat in the Hat
Madeline, with her vines and twelve little girls in two straight lines

All great, fun books to read aloud – my sons love them; and so do I. But do we spend too much time playing around with rhyming books and not enough time working on other skills children need for reading before they go to school?

SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four-and-twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie;
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing;
Was not that a dainty dish
To set before the King?

(During the next verse, somebody’s nose gets nipped.)

Before I answer this, let me back up for a moment and explain a couple of key concepts.

Phonological awareness

A strong predictor of later reading and spelling skills in pre-schoolers is what we call their “phonological awareness”. Phonological awareness is hard to explain. Essentially, it’s the child’s ability to attend to, identify and manipulate sounds in spoken words. It covers a bunch of sub-skills, including an understanding of:

rhyme (e.g. cat-hat-mat-sat, etc.);
stress patterns in words (e.g. the stress is on the first syllable of “water”; and on the second syllable of “begin”);
syllables or “beats” (e.g. elephant has three syllables: el-e-phant);
how words can be broken down or “segmented” into individual sounds (e.g. dog (d-o-g) is not the same word as dot (d-o-t)); and
how individual sounds can be put together or “blended” to make words (e.g. d+o+g = dog, a four-legged canine.)

Speech pathologists and other experts in early education agree that the explicit teaching of these skills is critical for later literacy education. This is because, in English, our written language uses an alphabet, a type of code. Written words are made up of letters (not sounds). But, for most of our words (over 80% of the time), the letters we use to spell are determined by the sounds they usually make. In other words, to understand the alphabetic code and to be able to read efficiently, children must not only know their letters, but the sounds they make.

Phonological awareness skills and literacy – which skills are needed most?

The research evidence tells us that, for pre-schoolers who are going to school next year:

phonological awareness activities should focus on the development of skills at the sound (phonemic) level (Brennan & Ireson, 1997);
sound segmentation and blending skills, and recognising the relationships between letters and sounds, are more strongly related to later reading and spelling than syllable or rhyme awareness skills (Hulme, Goetz, Gooch, Adams, & Snowling, 2007);
teaching letter knowledge and phoneme/sound awareness together may help both skills develop more efficiently than teaching the skills separately; and
skills like rhyme awareness may develop with improvement in speech production – either naturally or with therapy – and through general language stimulation at home or in school (Gillon, 2005).

So, yes, by all means have fun with rhyming books, nursery rhymes and songs. But make some time to play with sounds with sound segmentation, blending and letter-sound activities and games.

Your speech pathologist can offer some suggestions, and help you design a phonological awareness program for your child, either in therapy or for you to deliver at home.

Image and poem source: http://tinyurl.com/k3w4ost

Banter Speech & Language

Language

1. Speech and language are not the same thing

2. Speech and language problems don’t always happen together

3. Problems with speech development can sometimes affect language development and vice versa

JACK AND JILL

SING A SONG OF SIXPENCE

Phonological awareness

Phonological awareness skills and literacy – which skills are needed most?

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