Transcript for:
Understanding Preschool Language Development

This is your lecture on preschool language and specifically a focused discussion of phonological awareness but just other preschool language considerations for you as you move through this module. So just kind of as an overview of what are we expecting from our preschoolers in typical development? We are expecting our children who are typically developing to continue to add to the quantity of words they understand and produce. They are going to incorporate decontextualizing, contextualized language into conversation. So they're going to talk about here and now concepts, like what they can immediately see in their immediate history, but also then their concepts as well. So you're also going to see that they're decontextualized language may lack context cues They no longer, they'll start to speak in a way that does not any longer assume that the speaker and the listener have this same shared background knowledge and information. And they really are starting to really hone in on those decontextualized language skills that are going to give them more success when they go into the school age setting because so much about what we talk about in schools is decontextualized in nature. So let's just talk a little bit about other things related to language development, which are more in that cognitive linguistic domain a little bit. Which is theory of mind and the development of theory of mind skills and theory of mind development in the preschool period a little bit. So theory of mine or TOM, big T, big M little O, theory of mind, if you're not familiar, it's the ability to understand one's old mental and emotional state. The ability to understand that others also have emotional or mental states that are different from yours. And being able to understand that they not only have them, but realize that they may be different. And there is relationship between language and theory of mind skill development. They are interrelated. And that starts in toddlers, but it really extends and refines through the preschool period and above. So if we look at theory of mind, there is a progression of skills. First, the child is going to understand that people have different desires for the same thing, right? So like I may want to take those blocks and build a tower and you might want to take those blocks and build a racetrack, right? The second is that children demonstrate sensitivity to diverse beliefs and understand that people can have different beliefs about the same situation. So in that scenario on those two friends got in the fight, I could think that Johnny is in the right and then I could, somebody else could also think that Mary was in the right if the fight was between Johnny and Mary. As an example. The third is that children will understand that something may be true, but somebody else doesn't know that it is. So like, for example. They may realize if you can take this in like a sibling context, hey, mom wasn't home when um My brother spilled the milk on the couch and so he may assume that it was my little sister susie And she doesn't know that it was actually, you know, my little brother because she wasn't there when she saw it happen. Those kind of things. Fourth is that they can understand false beliefs or aka knowing that something is true, but that people can believe something different. So, you know, we can have a belief that something uh I can know that something is true, but I can believe something different than what is the actual truth. And I can still know that as like have been exposed to the truth, but still have an alternate belief. The fifth is that children understand hidden emotions or that somebody can feel one way but show another. So I can be saying, you know, everything's great here. I'm having a great day, but inside I might be having a really awful day. As an example. And the six is that they start understanding sarcasm, meaning that they understand that the meaning of the words is is opposite of that literal interpretation. There can be a like, I'm just fine, but they know that that's sarcasm and I'm not fine. So, you know, that's not just skills that develop through preschool. They develop kind of starting and, you know, toddlerhood into preschool and then into early elementary. But it's important to kind of know that. And then one thing for us to just know is the development of the morphosyntax skills of our children. So really thinking about from 36 to 60 months, you know, at 36 months, they're using four to five word sentences in typical development. In between 56 and 60 months, you're starting to combine five to eight words and sentences. So just knowing that is the norm. And then from a semantics perspective as well, just to expand on that, you know, by 36 months, they're using pronouns of they, them, us. They use fast mapping to learn new words, meaning they only need in typical development, just a few exposures before they get kind of the gist of it. And then they use slow mapping to get a deeper understanding and just, you know. Between 56 and 16 months, they should be using almost 2000 words and comprehend between 2.5 and almost 3000 words. And they'll use words like this, that here and there by that point in typical development. When we think about preschool morphological development, just to kind of go back to that first slide, this is the most significant area of morphine development is occurring in this time period of preschool and typical development. Especially verb morphology. So this is why in a preschool setting that we can start really making those identifications of kids who have more verb morphology issues and are likely to have a diagnosis of DLD. Preschoolers are expected to master to be verbs and it's popular and auxiliary forms during this time and typical development. And in terms of their sentences, we know that children in the preschool age range typically developing are going to increase their ability to form complex sentences. And move on from simple declaratives or subject-verb object sentences to more complex ones with different clauses that might be embedded or more elaborative sentence patterns like subjects and verbs or, you know, propositional phrases and things of that sort. Like you can see here. So content or their semantics, how they learn it. There is rapid language acquisition in the domain of semantics in typical preschool development. They use fast mapping, which means they acquire new words in as little as one exposure. And then they have that slow mapping that we already referenced that they gradually refine their mental representations or the symbolic representation in their head. With more time and multiple exposures and varied context so they can get a more nuanced understanding of the words they've been exposed to. But this is all just kind of a purview to show you really what is this typical development in preschool and how is that going to really be an important thing for us to consider when we're looking at children in the preschool age range. Who have language disorders. Just a reminder, look at the brown stages on the next two slides to review on your own the norms that we're expecting here. So let's just take a shift and talk about language disorders in preschoolers. So thinking about preschool language disorders. Children who are demonstrating disorders in disorders In preschool are really having challenges And when we think about this they're really having challenges in acquiring the foundation for academic language success that they need getting into kindergarten. Because we all kind of know that kindergarten now is more academic and a little less play based. Than it maybe has been in the previous 10, 15, 20 years. So children who still have language disorders in the preschool age range are at risk for later school failure. And we think about academics kind of in that school age language population. They might not be able to follow a storyline. So when somebody's reading a story or they're watching a movie, they can't follow that because they don't have that narrative structure that you've been exposed to and learned about already. They may not enjoy being read to because they have that comprehension challenge. They may not understand nouns, verbs, and propositions. Or they may, even if they do understand those nouns, verbs, and most prepositions. They can have difficulty retrieving words or following a series of directions. Again, those are our red flags for DLD. So that's why by this age we're starting to make that differentiation of who's going to outgrow it? Who's going to catch up? Who is more persistent language disorders that would then say, okay, you're no longer LLE. You're going to qualify for a DLD diagnosis. Children with preschool language disorders that don't have another etiology, again, are going to be the ones that are going to understand those basic nouns, verbs, and prepositions, but have trouble with that retrieval. Of those words, if they have a language disorder with a biomedical condition, they may even still struggle with those skills. Children who have language disorders at this time and who are likely to get a DLD diagnosis are going to show us underdeveloped syntax, but this can also be true for children that have a language disorder associated with a biomedical condition. And they also will have inadequate or disordered or incomplete morphological patterns of acquisition. So it might be more like Swiss cheese And so that's just something for you to think about. One thing for us to know is that there is a little bit of an overlap here. We can see that children may have DLD, but also have executive function. They may also have trouble with their working memory, which manifests in us seeing things like they have difficulty remembering and manipulating information over a short period of time. They can also struggle with inhibition or the ability to focus attention on a particular stimulus while avoiding distraction, which is called interference control. So they may have trouble focusing their attention on the book while maybe a peer is overplaying in the corner that they're being read too. They might have trouble with cognitive flexibility or also called cognitive shifting as well. All of this can be weaknesses for children with language disorders and specifically children with DLD. Sds or self-directed speech is impacted as well. And I'll talk about that here in a minute. On the next slide. So SDS, self-directed speech is known as private speech or inner speech or self-regulatory speech or self-talk, all the same term for self-directed speech. Sds. It's really just a term that's any speech that's not social in nature. It's directed at oneself and not at others. So think about like that kind of inner monologue, maybe. It's there to really support children's ability to support their self-regulatory skills. Both their behavior and also cognitive skills. So if you think about when you're taking a test and you kind of like talk to yourself. You're trying to problem solve through what answer am I going to select? What is the right answer? Or how do I do this problem? Or what is the correct clinical decision that I'm making on this test, it's kind of the beginnings of that skill developing for our preschoolers. Typical self-directed speech development is showing that in early childhood, so in our preschoolers or even our toddlers, we're going to see kids who overtly overtly like externally verbalize their self-directed speech And that's kind of the only way that self-directed speech manifests. But then over time they start to shift from it kind of being social, like where they're going to say it out loud and other people can Hear that, you know, self-directed speech because they're speaking it out loud, not only to themselves, but to others. To it turning into private or covert form so like that like say it to myself in my head kind of internal monologue. By age seven, their self-directed speech is more internalized. So being kind of like in their head, like talking themselves in their head versus saying it out loud for them and others to hear. So this is kind of what you see overt self-directed speech is here. And you kind of see as age increases overt self-directed speech decreases. Once we see it, it kind of ramps up in the toddler preschool hood. And then by seven, it's making a nice kind of blend down towards being more internalized. Based on the literature. If we think about our children with DLD and executive functioning in the preschool years, we know that there's kind of this interplay of executive function and language skills. That's why we sometimes in adults refer to it as cognitive linguistic because it's Cognition and language skills and they're different, but they are interrelated So what we see is that a child's executive functioning skills contributes to their language abilities and vice versa. If we, for example, when we look to the literature, if we help improve the working memory in children who have low socioeconomic status in our preschoolers. That can help significantly improve their those skills that I targeted in working memory helped improve untrained early literacy skills. So if I just worked on working memory skills. We saw improvement in not only the working memory skills that we trained in the research, but we also saw then an increase in their early literacy skills, which were not directly targeted. Not specifically thinking about things like listening comprehension. So that shows us that those executive functioning skills and also their language skills are tied together. Executive functioning development, we can increase executive function skills. It positively impacts their language development. But we also have evidence to show that if we address a child's language skills. That then it helps them kind of regulate their executive functioning. So thinking about self-directed speech, they can use their language to modulate their behavior or their responses. So if they don't have the ability to use language in a way that helps them talk through and modulate their own behavior, it can negatively impact their executive functioning performance. So what that really tells us is that executive functioning skills and language are bidirectionally related, meaning that there is an interplay. So what we do know is that self-directed speech or self-directed talk or that internal monologue helps support self-regulation. So their ability to kind of regulate their behavior and respond and problem solve in a variety of scenarios they find themselves. That's modulated by their internal self-directed speech, which may in our preschoolers still be external or spoken out loud. And in order to kind of talk yourself through a scenario, you need intact language skills or at least functional language skills, right? And we have some data that supports there is a delay of children with self-directed speech. The literature will tell you that's in children with speech and language or specific language impairment, but the new term is DLD. So we're seeing DLD kids have trouble with developing self-directed speech that helps them modulate their behavior, their responsiveness, maybe their impulsivity. Because their language is delayed, so they can't use it in a way that helps them modulate their behavior. And so we just see that children who have dld formerly known as SLI, have trouble using language in this way because their language is still immature. So that's something for us to really think about that interplay between executive functioning, emotional regulation. And our children that also have language disorders because language helps us refine and address our executive functioning skills and vice versa. So let's talk a little bit about general interventions for preschoolers. So we want to think about modeling self-talk and therapy. So how do we, like I didn't get my way, but that's okay. I can take a deep breath and I can count to one, two, three. If anybody's familiar with Mr. Rogers or Daniel Tiger, there's a lot of this that comes into those kind of toddler and preschool educational content that's showing how do we use language to modulate our behavior So that's something that we can also implement in our therapy. We know directly targeting self-talk or self-directed speech helps improve executive functioning. And as we continue to provide treatment and language skills increase, we want to kind of think if we're targeting self-directed speech or self-talk. How do we get them to move it from an external thing to an internal modulation? We also want to think about our children if we're thinking about addressing morphosyntax, so morphology or syntax. Or even semantics, they make semantic errors. So any sort of error that they have in their expressive language. We want to use conversational recast, so repeating their utterance, maintaining that meaning of the child's message. But adding or changing any grammatical, semantic, or phonological information, that's an error. So we're going to correct that kid's phrase and turn it into adult one to give the same meaning of what they intended to say, but in the adult form. Parents who, what we do know is that parents who interact with children who have DLD tend to recast less frequently compared to parents who are talking with typically developing children. But we also know that children who have DLD or language disorders need more of these recasts. They need more models of the correct form in use and also semantic information of their language to be able to correct their errors. So, um. Children who have developmental language disorders need that higher level. So just thinking about we need to get a higher frequency of recast used regardless of the domain of language that's impacted because they need that degree of repetition to be able to address their errors and modify them. What we are really trying to do is just We're trying to parallel that natural language acquisition and move them through those developmental sequence of language skills. Even if they're doing them at a later age than in typical developments, they'll move them up that scaffold. So if the kid says cow jump, we want to say the cow is jumping, right? If that's what our goal is. We're trying to get present progressive tense as an example. This is conversational recast is used with most preschool age children We can use recast interventions for words, suffixes, phonological forms, and syntax. But we can't use it for special skills like sound discrimination or auditory processing. So just know that. If our goal, for example, is to use a grammatical morpheme like ing or auxiliary verbs or copula, we have that written goal and we're focusing our recast on that skill we're trying to develop. There is lots of evidence to support recasting as a very, very evidence-based intervention, especially for addressing morphosyntax in our preschoolers. When we think about morphological interventions, we are really aiming to improve the knowledge of prefixes, suffixes that are age appropriate, base words, compound words as we get older, even word origins. In spoken and written morphology and spelling patterns. We're beginning to introduce them to this in preschool and then this kind of just continues on into the school age population. So we might talk about, oh, look. Do you see that ing at the end of the word when they know some of their letters? The later end of preschool and that helps them know that's that present progressive morpheme that's saying it's something that's happening right now. And really helping them use things like clause tasks or closed tasks so like the cow is Running. The cat is eating and making sure they can use those in that kind of fill in the blank format. Also trying to develop their problem solving skills to determine the meaning of unknown and morphologically complex words really starts with us. Getting them familiar with some of these parts of words in preschool, because that gives us the foundation for what they're going to do in school age. So really just thinking about preschool language development considerations that help us guide our preschool language interventions. This is really a time of language integration and consolidation. It is the foundation for literacy and meta-learning skills. And so they are really starting to use language to think about language So that metalinguistic skill and their future academic success is built upon the skills, the language skills that we develop in the preschool period. So we really are trying to give a lot of good solid intervention that is evidence-based. And we've already talked about some of those, but I really want to drive that home. Because these are the foundational spoken language skills that are going to help us set up success for reading. Reading is going to come into the school age you know. Kind of class as something that's spoken about a lot. What we really need to think about in preschool, we're getting these kids ready to read. And so they're getting exposed to phonological awareness skills and so understanding phonological awareness and our role in phonological awareness interventions is very, very important. So we're going to spend some time talking about that in this lecture. So phonological awareness, if you don't know what it is, it's the sensitivity of the sound structure of a word. It's measured by rhyming, blending, and deletion tasks, among others. And we'll talk about all the different phonological awareness skills children have to develop that begins in preschool, but kind of scaffolds into school age Research really supports a causal link between phonological awareness and early reading. So if our children has trouble in phonological awareness, we can expect that direct impact on their reading abilities. Good phonological awareness equals good readers, poor phonological awareness equals poor readers. That's what the literature tells us. So phonological awareness, it's a person's explicit awareness of or sensitivity to the phonological structures of a language. It's the ability to think about, compare, and manipulate those phonological speech sounds in words. And so it really is in that domain of form of language. Their phonological awareness in kindergarten for children or at the very beginning of first grade is very closely related to early reading achievement. So when we're trying to send kids into kindergarten, we're already sending them in if they've come from structured preschool, hopefully with some foundational skills or building blocks to build upon their phonological awareness abilities. But our children who may have developed language later or also have co-occurring language and speech sound disorders are at risk, right? Our whole thing about phonological awareness is that we know that if children are aware of the sounds of speech or the phonemes of speech And the phonemes of their language and understanding them at the beginning of formal reading instruction or written language instruction. So if they know the sounds, the phonemes. That are going to show up in those orthographic symbols. They are going to more quickly acquire an understanding of how printed language is related to verbal speech and verbal language output. And so we really need to recognize that this is important because this helps them be able to decode words or sound them out. And it helps them be able to analyze the sound structure of certain words, the phonological structure of it, which allows them to map those sounds and phonemes. Into the building blocks of language. The purest form of phonological awareness does not require orthography or print. So it's just buh. You're like, what sound is that? You know, buh. Together makes you bad and you don't need to put any sort of print word to it. So just kind of knowing that But as phonology, phonological Phenology is part of language, right? So we just need to keep that in this aware of that fact that this is challenging for those children. We also need to know the difference between phonological awareness and phonics, okay? So phonological awareness tasks require a child to analyze or make judgments about or manipulate the sounds or the phonemes in spoken words. They only need spoken stimuli. Phonics, on the other hand, is when children are working with print symbols, so i.e. The letters or the orthographic symbols. And those symbols then represent the sounds in oral language. So there's one degree of removal, right? They see the printed letter B and then they have to know that goes with buh, which is a phoneme in the English language. So it's really based on their not only Ability to hear, perceive, and know the difference between the phonemes, but also map them onto orthographic symbols or the alphabet. The ability to code an alphabetic script and become proficient in phonics requires phonological awareness first. So phonological awareness is the foundation that we build phonics upon. If the child knows alphabetic principles, that helps them continue to grow in their phonological awareness. So there is this like interrelatedness of both. And the development of other literacy skills influences the child's performance on phonological awareness tasks. So once we start targeting phonics that has an interplay with their phonological awareness skills. So let's just take a minute to talk about phonological awareness tasks. Phonological awareness is one type of metalinguistic skills or using language to talk about understand and think about language. So it enables children to analyze the sound structure of language. That's something we've known since the 70s. The simplest level of phonological awareness tasks are asking that child and seeing their ability to attend to and make judgments about the general sound structure of a language. Like, is this an English sound or is this not? Can they divide words into syllables, right? Kicked in two syllables. Can they identify and generate rhymes? So give me a word that rhymes with cat, fat, fat, hat. Can they match words with the same beginning sound? So give me a word that starts with the same sound as It's harp, right? They both have the harp phoneme at the beginning and they don't even need to know that that's H. If that's the letter H, because they do know that that's the letter H, that's phonics. But if it's just what starts with the same sound as hat and they say. Harp you're right. It starts with the… sound and no letter orthographic symbol needed So those are kind of your simple phonological awareness tasks. There are also phonological awareness tasks that are more complicated or more complex. So things like the ability to isolate and manipulate individual sounds or phonemes is another degree of phonological awareness, most specifically known as phonemic awareness. Which is a deeper level of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness is linked to early word decoding skills. So these next two slides, I'm going to really just show you kind of, I like this one better, but there is a second one on the next slide if you want to look at it for yourself. We are looking at kind of less complex or more complex phonological awareness skills. So less complex can they split words into syllables? Can they rhyme? Can they tell me these words sound Can you do alliteration. These words start with the same sound or cat and hat. Both end and or thought and cat both rhyme and Because they just have that final sound together. They don't have the same event vowel, right? So they know that based on that last sound being the same. Can they do onset rhyme segmentation? Can they segment initial and final sounds? Can you take the word cat and can you split off the Right. And then what's left you have at So that's something that we are typically going to ask kids to do. It is a phonological awareness skill that as you're seeing, it's also a phonemic awareness skill as well. And so can they blend sounds into words is kind of that next step. So what happens if you take Can you push them together? That's hot. Again, still doesn't require print. They can just do it with the auditory information. Can you split the word cat into its corresponding sounds, how many sounds are in it? There's three. The first one is Second one is the third one is… What happens if you take the word cat and you take off the, what are you left with? You're left with the little word. Great. What happens if you take the word cat? And you take the cough and replace it with a What word do you get back? That's hat. Right. So those are all things to know. Just kind of return to onset rhyme here for a minute. If you aren't familiar with onset rhyme, the term onset rhyme is really going to refer to the division of a syllable into two parts. The onset and the rhyme. The onset is the initial consonant sound or consonant sound or blend or consonant cluster. And the rhyme is the following vowel in all subsequent sounds in the syllabi or the syllabus, not syllabi, and the syllable, sorry. So you have the onset, which is that constant or the consonant cluster that is occurring at the beginning. And then there is the rhyme, which is the vowel and anything that comes after it in a syllable. So in the word cat. The onset is that initial phonological or phonemic unit of And then the term rhyme is referring to that. In the NCAT as an example. And button, if you would do it twice you would be buh is the onset and the… And like in the beginning. And then if you buff B is the first, the is the rhyme, and then but tin, right? So then the second syllable is tin. So in the second syllable, the syllable initiating is the tin. And then the rhyme is the end. So it's the together. So if that's not something that you learned in your phonetics classes, go back and make sure that that is familiar to you. Phonemic awareness, again, is a component of phonological awareness. It really helps. Children learn to read. It's very much linked with their reading ability. It helps them learn how to spell and read And it's most effective when it focuses on one or two types of phonemic manipulations rather than several. So most closely linked to their reading abilities is segmentation and blending. Those are critical skills for children to be able to read and spell. And we really have to think about the fact that phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when children are eventually taught to manipulate phonemes And then linking it to phonics by using alphabet letters. So all to say that phonological awareness and phonemic awareness is very closely intertwined with reading and writing abilities that are coming later down the pike for these kids when they get to school age. Many children with reading disabilities have deficits in phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. In problems of phonological awareness lie at the core of many developmental reading disabilities. Just to show how closely it's tied, we know that there is that reading is a very complex strand. So this is something that is from Scarborough. Burroughs research from 2001. It's called The Many Strands That Are Roven Into Being Skilled Readers or into skilled reading for children And so one is language comprehension and one is word recognition. So for word recognition, children have to have this strand of phonological awareness like syllables, phonemes, phonemic awareness, they have to have decoding skills. They have to understand alphabetic principles and spelling and sound correlation. So buh is represented by the written orthographic symbol for B as an example. And also have intact sight reading. So if they just see A and D together, they know that that word is and and they don't have to sound it out. That's the kind of three strands for word recognition, which helps them increase their automatic reading. When we think about being a skilled reader, though, it's not just word recognition. They also have to understand what they're reading when we make that switch from learning to read to reading to learn. So they have to have good language comprehension. So they have to have understandings of semantics and grammar, understanding texts, have background knowledge, so facts and concepts about what we're reading. Have verbal revisiting skills, reasoning skills, again, tying into that executive functioning and metacognitive skills. Because this allows them to be strategic, right? So I might be able to decode what I read, but do I understand what I wrote and read? And that's kind of how you get skilled reading at the end. So it shows us our kids with DLD are at a significant Risk of having trouble with reading because they likely have issues with language comprehension, semantics and grammar. And then we know they're at risk of phonological awareness challenges, which then impacts and decoding skills as well. So it's definitely something we need to be aware of. The SLP's role in phonological awareness and supporting transition to being ready to learn to read. Asha tells us that we have a role in literacy interventions, but that that can vary based on the other professionals that are available in their skill set. So for example. Some schools may have reading specialists that are teachers by educational trade and they're experts in that. And so we also kind of need to use that IPP lens and see about where is our overlap. But it's definitely not in our scope to say we don't do that. We definitely can do it. We just need to work collaboratively with other individuals who work in the literacy realm. We have to be collaborative because even if we're not working, say, on their reading, we are working on their language skills and we may be working on their phonological awareness skills, which is going to help support their reading and writing skills. We as SLPs have unique knowledge about language as it relates to those foundational skills for reading and writing, phonological awareness, semantics, orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness. So go back to those strands of reading, that Scarborough reading rope that I showed you. A lot of that is in our area of expertise. So we do still have a role to help support that. One thing to know is that there is a downward spiral of reading disorders when kids have trouble learning to read, they have low motivation, they have negative expectations like, well, I can't do this, so why should I try? They get less practice opportunities because they're resistant to read. It's hard. It also takes them a longer period of time. So they get less exposure to it. And again, when they get to that having to read to learn, they have decreased academic outcomes. And Dr. Kelly Farkorson from Florida State University really discusses this a lot in relation to children that have speech sound disorders that are phonological in nature. And how that impacts, again, because technology is a domain of language and how that impacts their phonological awareness skills and puts them at risk of reading disorders. So although we don't have kids reading in preschool, we're setting the foundation for this. I mean, we should be thinking about that with our phonological based feats on disorder children in preschool. And also our children that are going to likely have a DLD or a language disorder diagnosis in preschool. So it's something we really need to think about is that we're trying to avoid this downward spiral of reading disorders. By intervening early in the preschool period. Let's just take a quick note about phonics. So we talked a lot about phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Let's talk about phonics. So phonics helps us build from part to whole by using graphemes or orthographic or written symbols paired with the phonemes. So, you know, this letter is C and it matches with the hard sound. This is the A and it says a or ah, right? And they're learning those phoneme to grapheme mapping Then once we know that, they are going to teach blending. So C-A-T, let's blend them together cat and they're able to read it. And also having them be able to build, you know, based on the orthographic symbols that they have. So they are going to start with blending the sounds into syllables and then into words and then work on word building. So we take this back. To thinking just about, you know, generally speaking about children with language disorders and thinking about our children who are going into preschool at age three, turning four, turning five, and then going to kindergarten. And we think about these children who have developmental language Disorders or how language disorders associated with a biomedical condition by age three, we really have to start thinking about not just functional communication, but also academic impact of their language disabilities. And knowing that they are at high risk for things like phonological awareness challenges and also phonics challenges, which can really impact later reading, especially if they are more mild or moderate and they're DLD children and their functional language is okay, but maybe not perfect. We really need to think about lessening this gap that can positively impact their academic trajectory. We really know phonological awareness is tied to reading success and then tied to their phonics abilities and then tied to their ability to link print. To actual verbal language knowledge that they have or spoken language knowledge that they have. And so we also have to tie this to their narrative structures and the narrative skills they have. Can they structure oral narratives? Can they follow that story grammar? Because if they don't have that, that's also going to impact their reading comprehension and their future language comprehension. As it relates to ability to like write stories and write things down because they lack the ability to use those story grammar structures that we've talked about. And so there really is a lot of academic impact of language disorders phonologically based and also from a narrative base that we need to think about. Literacy is the entire lens in which education occurs, really starting in kindergarten. So we need to be thinking about it in the preschool population. Just a little bit more information, children with language impairments and some that even have co-occurring speech difficulties. Are at far greater risk for reading disabilities than the general population. To 65% of children with language impairments of some degree, DLD, language disorder associated with a biomedical condition, may be diagnosed in those early elementary grades with a reading disability. Because again, it goes back to these many strands that need to be woven to make a skilled reader in elementary school. And we are building this foundation in preschool again. So I can't highlight that enough. We talked about this, that learning to read is kind of where we're starting when they hit kindergarten. So they need to have those foundation skills, but recognizing that shift to reading to learn comes very early. In elementary school. And so we need to think about setting this foundation while they're in preschool. You know, if they don't have that baseline phonological awareness skills. It directly impacts that reading instruction that's coming at the very beginning of kindergarten because they can't map those print onto the phonemes of the language because they don't know that phonological system as well. They don't have the phonological awareness skills. And a lot of this bridge between phonological awareness and phonics is actually happening in the instructional period in preschool to give kids that exposure. So really just thinking about that. And so again, we really want to think about the fact that reading is interactive. That phonological knowledge, what, you know. And then being able to map it eventually to the phonics of the written letter b But then I can put that letter at, but do I know what the meaning of the word bat is, right? Do I have that semantic knowledge? Eventually, you know, reading sentences requires them to understand morphology and syntax. Is this something are they run like is this this ing in the words that mean they're currently doing it? Does that mean it happened in the past right so All these language skills we built in preschool really set them up for reading success. So you have to think about it this way when we think about what we're doing in preschool. We need kids to understand the orthography, the written language of this or the written symbols of their language. They have to have phonological knowledge of their language and literacy and these three wheels all kind of work together to make a skilled reader. And we are setting that foundation in preschool. So we just really need to think about that. We are not the speech sound disorders class. This is the birth to five language class, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk about speech sound disorders and phonological awareness. So just a little plug here for that overlap between speech sound disorders and phonology in the domains of language. So more than half of children with speech sound disorders experience difficulty with reading. That's what we know. All of those bullets are really just the literature to support that statement from me. In deficits and phonological system of a child with a speech sound disorder results in difficulty often for them to acquire phonological awareness skills, which are necessary prerequisites for reading. Preschoolers with speech sound disorders are at an increased risk for phonological awareness deficits. So even if they are quote unquote just a speech kid. If they have phonological based speech sound errors, they are at risk for future phonological awareness challenges and future reading challenges. The proportion of speech sounds and errors at age five is related to the likelihood of persistent errors at age eight. And if they still have those at eight when they're learning to read, right? That's going to likely impact their phonological awareness because when they are trying to say rabbit. They're saying rabbit. And so we're not getting that R phoneme as one example. And so really attending to those kids with phonological based speech sound disorders and knowing they're at risk for phonological awareness challenges is important. What we really know is that we need earlier identification, earlier intervention for phonological awareness. And tying that into a component of our overall language treatment for these children can reduce the risk of reading disorders. We can also tire phonological awareness interventions into our speech sound disorder sessions. So we can really reduce that risk of reading disorders for both sets of children. We can teach phonological awareness at any age and should, meaning I'm not saying we should teach it really young, but I'm saying sometimes it's the reverse when kids are in school and they're older, they think, oh, they're too young for, or they're too old for this instruction anymore. They should have gotten it when they were younger. And that's not true. We can back it up and teach it at any time. We just need to adapt it for the child's age. Again, speech sound disorder kids are at risk for language impairment, so we want to incorporate phonological awareness tasks into speech sound disorders. Treatment. This is just some awareness as screening in phonological awareness resources for you that you can embed in your assessments. So different screening tests that I really want you to look through on your own, but just drawing your attention to kind of how do I screen for phonological awareness concerns and what might that look like? So take some time to review those on your own. Phonological awareness treatment, let's just talk about this for a little bit as we wrap up. Just a couple slides here. So in preschool, if we're going to integrate tasks for phonological awareness, we can talk about, you know, give me a word that doesn't run or which one of these three words doesn't rhyme with the other two, right? So you've got cat and hat. And… foot, you know, which one doesn't rhyme? Well, clearly it's foot, right? They may not read, but we'll give them the pictures and they say them out loud. And can they figure out which ones rhyme and which ones don't? Can they match their rhyming words? You can play a memory match game. Really easy to do. If it's a kid that's working on their speech sound errors as well. It's just embedding this as an extra step of that process. If you're teaching new vocabulary, same thing. Can you identify words that start with a different sound? Can you blend syllables to make sounds? What happens if we put the word but and in together, you get button, right? Can they take syllables away from the words? If you take the word button and you take off the first word, but what do you get? You get in. There you go. Something like that, right? Can they split them up just as an example. Working on onset rhyme activities, that onset is the initial phonological unit of any word and the rhyme is everything that comes after. Working on onset and rhyme is something we should think about. If you're working with kids in preschool and they have certain like words of the week or certain words they're learning because maybe they're doing a literacy themed unit We can choose words from the curriculum, right? Vocabulary list. When they're older, you can even think about it in terms of like spelling lists, but in preschool, not super relevant. Choosing words from popular common story books or things that they know Or any book that that child is really interested in. And you can double dip and really treat their lexicon or their semantic knowledge and also their phonological awareness skills as well. Okay, phonological awareness and speech sound disorders. You can add phonological awareness skills to any speech sound disorder. So like here's an example. If a child is working on the SH sound. This is an example that's more in kindergarten and first grade, but we can still use these kind of examples in preschool. So maybe they're working on and they're working on shade and shore and sheep and shovel and shriek. So here's the words. Those are really common words they might get in kindergarten. So we'll use them because they're, you know, a rising five-year-old. How many words can you think of? All right, let's make your good SH sound because maybe they're a stopper and they're saying Tade instead of shade. Great, they get it. You know, here we go. We got the shade. They were able to do it through minimal pairs or whatever. Great. I heard a good shade now. How many words can you think of that rhyme with shade? What happens if you take the away and change it to er. Can you think of three other words that start with the same sound as shade? What happens if I change the at the end of shade to a puff? Do those words rhyme? Do they not? And those kind of things. So it's really easy to extend those therapy ideas you know into something else? Can you think of a word that starts with the same sound, ends with the same sound. Rhymes, you know, we can just really go back to this hierarchy of phonological awareness skills And just embed it into any sort of vocabulary semantic intervention we're doing or even speech sound disorder intervention. So just some tips and tricks for thinking about that. Lastly, just a goal about prevention in children with speech and language diagnosis in preschool. Really, at the end of the day, our goal is to stimulate development of phonological awareness skills to positively impact their literacy development. We can integrate phonological awareness into the other goals for their phonological needs or their language needs that we already have. And you can work on multiple phonological awareness skills at once. So at the end of the day, the takeaway from this lecture is really that we should in preschool be aware of phonological awareness needs of our children. We should be thinking about even if it's not a direct goal that we're writing at this time, how do we kind of work in that prevention mode? Because we know these children likely may have challenges with reading and how do we kind of set them up to give them more exposure and more success moving forward. And we should also be thinking about how to screen and assess this and be able to provide support and intervention for these children so they can be more successful and hopefully struggle less with reading if they are in that higher risk category. So that concludes the lecture for this week. Please review the slides and the additional readings that you'll find in the course cell and pop any questions that you might have for me. Into D2