No I really agree with that, it’s as if our totality as people and our life experience is completely

As part of a new campaign, Mind is urging anyone who is worried about their mental health to speak to their GP. An honest, pragmatic, and comforting field guide for each of us searching for a way to live with loss.” Until twenty years ago, we thought of “delayed echolalia” as deviant, and we truly thought that we were supposed to “extinguish” it. But, during the next decade, language researchers found that ASD kids use echolalia communicatively…to request, to ask questions, to achieve all the same functions of more “typical” language! We then began to treat it more respectfully. We will return to Will’s story, I promise you. But before we do, let’s continue to construct the conceptual bridge from typical kids to ADD kids, and next, to those ASD children who are younger and solidly within the prime language learning years…those who are 3 – 8 years old. Their story will help us better understand older kids, like Will, whose language appears more rigid and intractable.We helped Karen learn to build useful, flexible “gestalts” into their daily lives. Recognizing that all language that surrounds a child constitutes inadvertent “models,” we wanted to make sure that Daniel heard not only Walt Disney’s language, but plenty of other language that would become useful in everyday communication. “Let’s get out of here!” works much of the time, but “Come on!” is more generally communicative. This PowerPoint has everything you'll need to provide your class or children with some fun word games for kids. 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:

Together with our local Minds in Wales we’re committed to improving mental health in this country. Together we’re Mind in Wales. 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. Gestalt learners are “normal” too, but their language acquisition happens in a very different manner. Because they begin with multiword strings of words, attempting to say them as “unanalyzed chunks,” their articulation skills may render their attempts unintelligible. Over time, as gestalts are mitigated, or broken down into their constituent parts, they are easier to say, and, thus more intelligible, and identifiable. But by the time we recognize that our kids are talking, they have usually been talking for a long time, albeit unintelligibly. And, because their process takes longer than analytic learners, children who use this method appear “delayed.”I went to my GP in Ealing in November 2014 to talk about feeling depressed and he was absolutely fantastic. I initially made the appointment to discuss an ear infection, but when he asked how I was feeling I just broke down and told him everything." James Freedman, the fifteenth president of Dartmouth College, began life in a struggling middle-class Jewish family in a provincial industrial New Hampshire town. By the time of his death from cancer in March 2006, he was one of the most celebrated educational leaders of his generation, perhaps of the twentieth century. Finding the Words is Freedman’s account of the first twenty-seven years of this astonishing trajectory in a life made difficult by depression, but sustained throughout by a love of books and learning, a life that would transform the culture of American higher education. For starters, our kids (excluding those with Aspergers, of course) rarely “get” language without a struggle. For most extremely right-brained children, those with ASD diagnoses, the tendency to rely on strengths and avoid relative challenges, undermines the unaided progression of the natural gestalt language acquisition process. 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.

But not so with our kids! In our clinic, we see older kids, even teenagers, who are learning rule-based grammar…some for the first time! With older kids like Will, who was highlighted in our last column, the process of breaking down language “wholes” or “gestalts” doesn’t happen as rapidly or as readily as it does with kids who are younger. But it still happens! We will return to these older kids in a later column, but, now, we want to give you a longitudinal picture of how the language acquisition process works when ASD kids begin it sooner. As promised, 4-year-old Dylan’s [‘Daniel’ from our previous column] progression through the first three stages of Gestalt Language Acquisition (See Sidebar) will be detailed in this column. We first met Dylan at his home, and played with him in our clinic the following week, recording everything he said during that second meeting. Most of what Dylan said was unintelligible to us, although his mother knew much of it, and even which video it came from. Long strings of vague sounds representing multiple sentences such as, “Let’s go find him come on Spot now let me think where are you” made up the bulk of Dylan’s verbal output. Other, shorter comments like, “Where’s the snowball?” were easier for us to understand, but still confusing on this early fall, snow-free, day.

If you're finding things hard emotionally right now, you're not alone. We're here to give information and support. We’ll help you learn what to listen for, and how to respond to what you hear. Then, you, too, can help your child move through the process…naturally! Time and again we have learned that once we examined the original source of a gestalt, and tried our best to understand its meaning from the child’s perspective, we could respond accordingly! And it is pure magic when our kids realize we “get it!” Their joy is palpable, and sets the stage for more to come! We know from considerable “near misses,” too, that even the attempts at understanding are amazingly satisfying to our kids. They know then that we take them seriously as communicators, and will keep trying to understand them better.

See if the following story rings some bells. If so, you will find that the remainder of this article will usher in a bright new future for your own child’s natural language acquisition! OK, so this language acquisition processing of typical kids may make some sense, as you think about boys you have known (or been!)…but, what about our kids…what about Will…what about your own child? For instance, Scrabble is one of the most popular word games in the world, and requires players to rearrange random letter tiles into meaningful words. Other word scramble type games include Boggle and Jumble, in which players are given jumbled letters of a single word. Plenty of word scramble games also exist for the digital crowd, including Words with Friends. Words with Friends is a very popular game that functions much like Scrabble and requires players to create words out of random jumbled pieces. Wordscapes is another popular game that requires players to rearrange letters to form words. Of course, there are also classic games like word searches and crosswords, which are similar to word scrambles. Ways to improve at word scramble games? It is revealed that Harriette is two years older than her sister, Rachel. In reality, Jo Marie Payton is two years younger than Telma Hopkins. 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.Step 3 is to review the charts in Part 3 of this series of articles on Natural Language Acquisition (September-October 2005 issue) and find some matches with what your child says. If your child is young (2-4 years old), you may find only one level, e.g. Stage 1 gestalts, too long for his young speech system to say well. Maybe it just sounds like “gibberish,” or “jargon,” or maybe “his own language.” This is what we, in our clinic, call “intonational utterances,” and includes the tone and rhythm of whole language gestalts, but not the individual speech sounds. It was imperative to be lively, friendly, and fun, and to give Dylan something that he couldn’t get anywhere else (meeting his sensory-motor needs helped!) He learned that listening to us was entertaining, and he trusted us to give him language he could use to keep us playing with him! Dylan still used movie gestalts as well, and mitigated them nicely, but all his language was becoming increasingly “transparent” and easier-to-interpret. Following are some utterances from our third month: