Imagine you are in full-flow conversation about the latest film you have seen and suddenly whilst you are raving about it you are unable to recall the name of it or the lead actor’s name. You probably spend a few seconds desperately thinking, followed by describing the actor, the plot of the film, other films similar for others to fill in the names you have forgotten. If this is successful you all laugh and move on. If not you then end up feeling frustrated and continue to think it over trying to remember. It effectively ends the conversation.
Then at night just as you are dropping off – Ping! the name appears like magic, there all along. It happens to all of us occasionally. Can you imagine that happening over the simplest of words in every sentence you wish to say? Frustrating is the word. Also imagine that you have no strategies to help someone guess the word you wish to say – you end up in silence or give up and move on. Some children live with this every day. For some it is part of a greater language difficulty; for others a result of lacking in vocabulary or learning a large amount of vocabulary suddenly.
These problems can make children difficult to understand as they use different strategies to overcome their difficulties. They might:
- Say a word that means a similar thing but is incorrect
- Say a word that sounds similar e.g. “telephone” instead of “television”
- Say a made up ‘jargon’ word e.g. “bubet” instead of “bubble”
These children are often referred to the Speech and Language Therapist because they cannot say the sounds in words correctly, but the cause is much more complex and the treatment very different. Children with word-finding difficulties often have lots of vocabulary, but it is like a messy desk with each word represented by a piece of paper on the desk. There is no order, or system in place to help locate the one piece of paper (word) they need. What Speech and Language Therapy aims to do is turn the messy desk into a well-ordered filing cabinet with cross referencing to help a child to locate a word or describe it easily when they are really struggling.
Therapy focuses on organising words into categories, syllables in words and the length of words, knowledge of first sounds in words, and rhyming words, and linking all this knowledge together. So if you think a child is hard to understand, please don’t just assume they cannot say their sounds. They could be searching for the right words to say.
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