word retrieval

[Guest guest]

I'm jumping in on this conversation late in the game here, but my son

Quinn had some big issues with word retrieval. Once the apraxia was

for the most part resolved, we saw a big problem with his language

use, and therapy is ongoing for this. When he tried to talk, you

could see him sort of flipping through his mental rolodex for the

word he needed, and he would often get it wrong, or say he didn't

know.

Our therapist thought he had all his words in there, but that he

needed help organizing them - she likened it to him having bits of

information written down on little bits of paper and scattered all

over the floor, and therefore they were hard to find when he needed

them. We spent several months, organizing these bits, or filing them

neatly in his mental filing cabinet in classifications. We worked on

classes and categories of things... arranging pictures in a pile of

animals, vehicles, people, food. Then we broke it down (i.e. foods

were organized into breakfast, supper, deserts, fruit, meat,

vegetable, etc). Once he had something in a category, his AMAZING

memory took over. He only had to be shown once what category

something fit in, and then he got it. This method was amazingly

helpful for my son, and the word retrieval issues have fallen off.

It was kind of neat to watch the process and see it work so well!