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  Modeling occurs when a communication partner uses language or speech relevant to the conversation in a natural environment. There are three types of modeling strategies that can be used to expand language and communication including self-talk, parallel talk, and expansion.   Self-Talk Self-talk occurs when the communication partner (e.g. parent, sibling, guardian, family member) describes what they are doing aloud for the child to hear.    Ex: “Dad is cutting an apple” “ the apple is green” “I’m dunking the apples” “yummy”    Parallel Parallel talk occurs when the communication partner describes what the child is doing aloud.    Ex: “you are pushing the blue play-doh” “cut the play-doh” “squeeze” “oh no the play-doh is green” “roll the play-doh” 

I had the opportunity to listen to a podcast with Chris Constantino, who is a speech language pathologist and a person who stutters. In his podcast, he discusses the neurodiversity movement and how some its beliefs, namely the acceptance and value of differences, can be applied when working with our clients who stutter. Treatment, he reports, shouldn’t focus on forcing individuals to be fluent, but rather, should focus on overall quality of life and exploration and acceptance of an individual’s stutter. One of the activities he would complete when working with middle school students included reacting to negative comments or micro aggressions from others. He engaged the students in role playing and had them practice how to teach people about

Sensory integration refers to the processing, integration and organization of sensory information from the body and environment. It includes how we experience, interpret and react to or ignore information coming from all of our senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, small, proprioception (body awareness and position,) vestibular (awareness of movement, balance and coordination) and interoception (tells us what’s happening inside our body like hunger or fatigue.)) Sensory integration and regulation play an important role in language development as children need to be in a regulated state to learn. A dysregulated state can impact a child’s participation, independence and engagement in daily activities. Occupational therapist Winnie Dunn developed a framework, termed Winnie Dunn’s sensory processing framework (DSPF) which yields four sensory patterns.

Over the holiday break, I had a chance to read a book called Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain by Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric otolaryngologist specializing in hearing loss and cochlear implantation with the University of Chicago Medicine. She is also the founder and director of the Thirty Million Words project. In the book, Dr. Suskind shares her research findings and provides a framework for how parents can provide a language-rich environment in the birth-to-three years. I found this book to be very interesting and thought it would be helpful to share some of Dr. Suskind’s findings in a blog post.  Firstly, why the name Thirty Million Words? Dr. Suskind discusses the relationship between the amount of language