Autism. Part 5. Speech disorders in autistic children: systemic causes and methods of correction
Primary sound trauma inhibits the development of a child's speech, and the necessary speech skills do not appear in due time. Usually there is a delay or absence of the humming and babbling phase. When babbling and humming occurs, they are usually not intoned (little emotionally colored) and are not addressed to an adult …
- Part 1. Causes of occurrence. Raising a child with autism
- Part 2. Motor stereotypes and excessive tactile sensitivity in a child with autism: reasons and recommendations for parents
- Part 3. Protest reactions and aggression of a child with autism: causes and methods of correction
- Part 4. Life is illusory and real: special symptoms in children with autism
- Part 6. The role of the family and environment in the upbringing of autistic children
In this article, we will consider the features of speech development in autistic children. Recall that the onset of autism is associated primarily with trauma in the sound vector, as a result of which the child is fenced off from the world, his learning ability and ability to contact others are significantly reduced. The development of all the skills and properties of the psyche, conditioned by the vectors of the child, is disrupted as a consequence. Due to the fact that the child's connection with the outside world is broken, the main goal of verbal communication is not realized: contact with the listener is not established.
Primary sound trauma inhibits the development of a child's speech, and the necessary speech skills do not appear in due time. Usually there is a delay or absence of the humming and babbling phase. When babbling and humming occurs, they are usually not intoned (slightly colored emotionally) and are not addressed to an adult.
The first words and phrases, as a rule, also appear later, but sometimes, on the contrary, the speech starts too early. What unites these two different types of speech development is that in both cases the speech is not addressed to another person, and the first words, as a rule, are pretentious, little used, unusual. Sometimes there is also a regression of speech at the level of individual words.
With Asperger's syndrome, the child can talk a lot and avidly, quotes whole encyclopedias, but does not know how to listen at all. Feedback from the interlocutor is of little interest to him. Nevertheless, at an early age, the development of such a child rarely worries the parents, on the contrary, it causes the feeling that a small genius is growing in the family. His speech is usually emotionally saturated, there is a tendency to declamation. Problems begin later, already at school age, when it turns out that the child cannot adequately behave in a team and master the school curriculum.
In Kanner's syndrome, the picture of speech development is completely different. Speech develops with a serious delay, is poorly intoned and remains for a long time at the stage of the so-called "echolalia" (unintelligible repetitions of words or phrases heard before). Nevertheless, with qualitative correction and the efforts of the parents, it is such a child who later begins to use echolalia for communication purposes.
The form of speech remains incorrect for a long time (for example, the child, instead of “I want juice”, will say “you want juice,” that is, repeat the phrase in the form that he heard from the parent). But one way or another, this already gives a start to the fact that speech begins to be used for its intended purpose - to establish communication with other people.
Methods for correcting speech development in autistic children
First of all, both parents and teachers need to understand that it is necessary to work on the formation of the child's ability to dialogue and cooperation.
For non-verbal children, correction should begin with the development of a passive vocabulary (a passive vocabulary is the number of words the child understands). For example, several household items (cup, spoon, etc.) are placed on the table in front of the child. At the request of an adult ("give" or "show"), the child must choose the desired item. When the child's passive vocabulary has been sufficiently developed (at least about 200 words denoting household items, household items), you can proceed to work with cards.
Work with cards is carried out as follows: next to a real object you need to put a card with the corresponding image. This allows in the future to go to work with book manuals. And if the child's active speech does not develop, he will be able to communicate with others with the help of cards. Some parents and professionals also use sign language to enable future autistic children to interact with the outside world.
For an autistic child who nevertheless possesses some kind of skills in his own speech, the main task at first is to establish a dialogue with another person, to develop the ability to hear and perceive the addressed speech. To do this, you can use various kinds of poems and nursery rhymes, built in a dialogue form. For instance:
Adult: We drove by car
Child: BBC
Adult: We got to the corner
Child: BBC
Adult: We were driving a steam
locomotive Child: Chukh-chukh, chug-chug
Adult: We drove into the garden
Child: Chukh-chukh, chug- chuh.
You can think of other variants of games in which the "right to vote" is transferred from one player to another. For example, we pass the ball in a circle, and each player says 1 word of a well-known poem.
Experts note that for some autistic children, music lessons are of considerable benefit, in which you do not need to speak, but sing various sounds, and then songs. This is especially true for those children who have stuttering or other speech therapy disorders.
Often in children with autism, there is a significant gap between the ability to speak single words and phrasal speech. In this case, you can use work with cards and pictures. For example, in the picture is a boy with a glass. Word cards are attached. It is necessary to collect the phrase "He drinks" ("she is sleeping", "the cat is eating", etc., depending on the current level of development of the child). After a while, the cards with words are removed and the child is asked to tell what is happening in the picture. Later you can move on to unfamiliar pictures.
If the child has already developed the ability to dialogue, it is important to teach him how to answer questions for pictures, give a short description, retell the text he heard.
It is also important for parents of autistic children with Asperger Syndrome to understand that the main task of human speech is not self-presentation, but the ability to connect with other people. Even if a child looks like a little genius, but hears no one but himself, you need to work on this, otherwise you will face serious problems already at school.
The same verses and nursery rhymes with the sequence of remarks will not be superfluous for such a child. Perhaps you can offer him a more complex version of such exercises: for example, arrange a home puppet theater, where there is also a sequence of remarks from different characters.
Summing up the above, I would like to emphasize once again that for the development of the skills and abilities of an autistic child, it is important for him, first of all, to provide a sound ecology, as well as a sense of security and safety, which is largely based on the balanced psychological state of the mother. A basic understanding of the sound vector gives a completely different understanding of what is happening with the child and the problem of autism in general. These topics are covered, among other things, in other articles, and you can learn more about this at the training on system-vector psychology by Yuri Burlan. You can register here and now.
