The Language Experience

by Cecile L. Stein, Ph.D.

The Language System

To understand language and the language system, try to picture a ladder. Imagine that you are climbing this ladder until you reach the top where you enter a large place filled with every bit of knowledge you have acquired throughout your life.  This repository contains facts about people, events and places, and their interrelationships.  We understand the meaning of language through the filter of our experiences.

Let the rungs on the ladder represent the different components of the language system. The first rung on which you step represents the sounds of the language you speak (called phonology).  In order to understand and speak your language, you must be able to arrange these sounds into meaningful units, so at the second rung, you recognize that these sounds have formed words.

You’ve collected many words now, but the message isn’t meaningful enough until you’ve climbed to the third rung where the syntactic system organizes the words into sentences. At the fourth rung, you’ve put the message together, and you can now enter this place which contains your world knowledge.  It is here that you truly understand what the message means to you.  Here, your accumulation of world knowledge gives the message its true meaning with all the colour, shading and subtleties you interpret the message to mean.  For example, having heard the sentence It’s cold in this room, you may understand the message to mean a statement of fact or an indirect request from the speaker to close the window.

Identifying the Deficit

Where is the language problem for the individual with a learning disability (LD)? That depends. The problem could be in one, two or all the areas in the language system.  This child may, therefore, have difficulty primarily in discriminating between sounds when listening or in linking sounds to letters. The resulting problem may be a decoding deficit.

Other youngsters may have difficulty at the vocabulary level, the second rung on the ladder. They have difficulty acquiring new words.  Their vocabulary is limited which makes reading comprehension a struggle when text has many unknown words.  In addition, expressing ideas may be laborious because of the lack of an available store of words.

Closely related to this vocabulary weakness are word finding problems, which occur frequently in the language LD (LLD) population. Similar to the youngster with an insufficient expressive vocabulary, the child with word finding problems (also called word retrieval problems or anomia) has difficulty rapidly searching for the right words to express thoughts.  The results of this problem vary.  Some youngsters may circumlocute or beat around the bush to explain ideas.  This strategy often creates such vague and loose discourse that the listener is often unsure of the child’s message.  Another problem here is that the speaker may even lose his focus as he mentally wanders, trying to find the right words. Some youngsters with word finding problems do not circumlocute, but give up the search for words. They are often the ones who say I don’t know or Forget it.  They may speak less and are, consequently, uninformative.

Imagine LLD children in a social studies class where recalling names, places and key ideas are required. These children may have difficulty retrieving the information fully on a test, or when responding to the teacher’s questions in class. The answers they give may be tangential because they have problems stating the main point.

Children with difficulty at the syntactic level (rung three) have problems understanding the precise meaning of a sentence or paragraph (whether spoken or written). Without the syntactic system in place, that is understanding who did what to whom, the listener makes guesses about the message.  Sometimes the guesses are good ones because the child has gone straight to his knowledge of the world to make the interpretation.  For example, you need syntactic knowledge to understand  a sentence such as: “The truck was hit by the car.”, since the subject is at the end of the sentence.  In English, the subject is usually in the beginning.

You can use your world knowledge instead of syntax to understand The baby was fed by the mommy because you know that mommies usually feed babies, not the other way round.  Children with syntactic deficits try to use their world knowledge to understand language which is syntactically complex:  but that is guessing at meaning.  Their wrong guesses are highly noticeable. For example, some children might be confused as to who was hurrying home in the sentence Hurrying home from the movies, we found Roberta had left a note on the table.

Imagine the problems youngsters with syntactic deficits face when reading literature and social studies texts. How does this youngster get at the information as the text becomes more syntactically complex and the amount of information to wad through increases?

Some LLD youngsters may actually do fairly well, understanding syntactic complexity, but have more trouble getting the point of the message. Making inferences and understanding the main idea involves using world knowledge, and some people are better at literal comprehension than making inferences and understanding figurative language.  These youngsters may be the ones who do not understand jokes, sarcasm, slang, puns and idioms such as I couldn’t return your call because I was all tied up at work today.

Many LLD youngsters have processing problems. They have difficulty remembering long sentences or sentences containing too much information. Following directions and retaining the details or facts in a story are affected. Some children have difficulty enjoying stories read to them because they haven’t retained enough information or have become confused by too many characters and events.

In spite of these language problems, some children manage to have wonderful social lives. They enjoy people and people seek them out.  Others, however, begin to have social problems because they have trouble keeping up with the rapid flow of conversation, introducing and maintaining topics in a conversation.  Feeling unable to keep up, these youngsters exclude themselves from groups or become excluded. Remediation

The Language-Based Curriculum

How do we address these problems, particularly when in any given class, various language problems co-exist? Many youngsters receive language therapy from speech-language professionals. However, there are principles which can be applied to all youngsters whether or not they receive individual language therapy.  These principles relate to the school’s curriculum, and parent-child language interactions.

The purpose of the Language-Based Curriculum is to bring the principles of communication and language knowledge into the classroom. Here, both teacher and student are made aware of their responsibilities as communicators in the transmission and learning of the academic curriculum.  The Windward School curriculum is an example of a total program where language skills are taught and reinforced throughout the curriculum.  Teachers and language specialists work together to bring about this goal.

First, the LD child needs to understand what he hears and reads. To reach that goal, the school transmits and teaches explicitly the rules of the language which the non-disabled child automatically acquires.  For example, the children are taught  to distinguish a grammatical from an ungrammatical sentence, and correct the ungrammatical one.  They must learn whether what they say, write or read makes sense. Children without language impairments develop this knowledge with greater ease.  They understand what they hear and read more efficiently.

Teaching the rules of the language improves the student’s reading comprehension because it provides the foundation for precise sentence understanding. However, to achieve true reading comprehension, the LD youngster must also be taught to use his world knowledge, develop inferential skills and learn the elements of what is called story grammar.

The elements of story grammar, which include the main idea, characters, events and time, challenge the LD reader as the story progresses from paragraph to paragraph. When a LD child says that he does not understand what he is reading, the teacher must determine where within the language system he got lost, and find him strategies to get back on track.

Second, the LLD child needs to develop communication skills. He must be taught to recognize effective from non-effective communication, whether the listener understands his message and how to paraphrase when the first attempt fails to communicate.

Third, the LLD child needs to learn the language skills and strategies necessary for classroom success. For example, in a classroom, the LLD child must learn to ask questions about concepts being taught.  He needs to recognize and respond when the language has confused him and ask for clarification.  In a classroom conversation, the LLD child needs to be able to follow the focus of the teacher’s lesson in order to make his personal contribution.  All of these skills are important for social communication as well.

Teachers utilize specific questioning and responding procedures to maximize the comprehension and retention of the material taught. They speak at a slower rate to permit processing of information.  They recognize when students are having communications breakdowns and utilize procedures to help the student shape and state his utterances.  Teachers provide language organizing strategies for written expression.

Parent-Child Responsibilities

The language interaction between parent and child is critical to the early development of communication skills. The LLD child benefits, however, from special parental speaking strategies.

To that end, it is important for parents to be able to size up the home communication environment. For example, do family members speak to the LLD child on the run?  Is the speech rate too rapid for the child to be able to process information?  Are there opportunities to make inferences and to hear inferences from others?

Face-to-face speaking is important for the child with attention and/or auditory processing problems. Pacing the flow of conversation so that the LLD youngster has an opportunity to organize thoughts and find the appropriate words to express ideas, revise and repair utterances is important as well.  Asking the youngster for his opinions gives him a chance to take on new speaker responsibilities.

Parents can encourage appropriate social language skills which will benefit the child outside the home. Encouraging turn-taking behaviour and correctly reading and responding to body language is part of social language skills development.

In conclusion, the development and learning of language skills is an exciting process to observe as it emerges in our children. The LLD child painstakingly learns these skills which are so naturally acquired by the non-LD child.  Their mastery breeds success.  Once the process of language awareness has begun, learning has begun.