happy Tuesday Tuesday night at 6 30 central time and we are back here for this series that I'm doing that's going to include a lot of information about language and tonight is going to be all about Gestalt language processors so I want to know who is here with me I'm doing a live stream to both Facebook and YouTube at the same time right now so I want to see how it goes I want to see if I can get comments from people from both um so we're kind of testing the waters here so let me know in the comments are you watching on Facebook are you watching on YouTube uh let me know let me know where you're watching from so I live in Wisconsin I'm On the Border I teach in Minnesota and we have like this unseasonably warm stretch of weather that is only only lasting for two more days um if you're watching the replay at a later date it is November 1st and so usually we're well into winter weather but we have like 70 degrees this week every day and it's beautiful so um I see Shara here thank you for joining me um let me know too um are you a parent are you a special education teacher are you a grandparent uh OT speech language uh what's your background why are you here and oh hi Jill so glad to see you and Lindsay awesome to see you okay well we have a nice group of people here tonight so I love any chatting and questions in the comments uh lets me know everyone's still awake and uh especially with this topic if you have any questions let me know if you are watching the replay feel free to ask questions too and just put in hashtag replay and I'll try to get in there over the next couple days and answer questions you might have Hi Megan in Texas Amanda oh awesome it's been 70 in Pennsylvania too fantastic Amanda pair of professional that's the one I didn't say and that is who I depend on every single day so thank you for being here Lindsay's a parent of two okay so let's get started I value your time yesterday was Halloween I hope your classroom went smoothly and well today mine was pretty good despite the day after Halloween and Halloween falling on a Monday anyway um we are going to talk about Gestalt language processors so I do want you to tell me before I get going in the comments how comfortable are you on a scale of one to five if you had to explain Gestalt language processing to a parent or another person uh one a zero being I know nothing I would not know how to explain it and a five being like I'm an expert I can totally explain what that is so where are you on that zero to five scale for how comfortable you are with Gestalt language processing and I love the honesty here and I'll tell you guys like this has been a learning curve for me too we did not learn about this topic in college even speech and language Pathologists right so we didn't learn about this we learn it over time and we get more comfortable even saying the word Gestalt sometimes seems weird because it's the sh sound where there's an S so I did look up the pronunciation just to be sure but it's Gestalt but you might hear people say Gestalt too it's fine we know what everybody means right so okay so you guys are kind of like between a zero and a three and that's great um this is kind of like intro 101. in my autism Little Learners membership that's for parents and Educators we're going to dive deeper into this and um look into ideas for how to build on language for Gestalt language processors so let's get started now we have Gestalt language processors and we have analytic language processors and I'm going to tell you about the difference so an analytic language processor is most typically developing children they are analytical language processors and that means they learn language in more of a sequential typical order so when we think of kids that learn one word and then they learn to combine two words and then they speak in short sentences and then they speak in longer sentences and then they learn additional grammar skills along the way so they go in these Norms the normal so-called sequence for learning language and we know that our autistic students that we have whether you've worked with autistic children for years many years or a couple of years we know our kids do not follow that same path it's not linear right and often not predictable so Gestalt language processors are children who fall into the style of language development where they start speaking in chunks of language and this can be so confusing not only for parents but for professionals too like okay but he can't tell me that he's hungry and say eat or uh want cookie but he can sing a whole song and he can say all the words in the song he can recite the ABCs he can script different scenes from cartoons right let me know in the comments do you have students like that that maybe aren't functionally using verbal speech to let you know what they want what they need to have some chit chat but they can sing entire songs or they bring out like chunks of songs yes Ashley says yes okay so this is autism right it's a big part of autism so often when you have a Gestalt language processor it usually starts with immediate echolalia and we're going to go into that a little bit oh yeah Jill says I have a few students like this someone said for sure yes okay and I think what is hard is sometimes people will say about these kids like well I know they know how to say uh such and such word let's come up with uh they know how to say I'll give an example later of hickory dickory dock now if I showed them a picture of a clock they might not be able to understand what each word in the song Hickory Dickory Dock means because you have Mouse you have run up the clock right and so they might not be able to break each sentence down and know what each word means but they know what the chunk means they know this is a song that I like and they might if they watch it on YouTube they might have a visual Vision in their head of what the cartoon or the uh song looks like right so to them that's a chunk and so when we talk about echolalia this is present when a child repeats what another person has said and I'm assuming you guys are probably pretty comfortable with what echolalia is let me know in the comments like if someone asks you what's echolalia you could probably give a simple answer like oh it's when a child repeats what I say right so this is a piece of Gestalt language processing and so you know more than you think you do already when it comes to that term so echolalia is when kids repeat what someone else said and this is from Asha the American speech language and hearing associate Association and they talk about two different types of echolalia and I bet a lot of you are also familiar with both of these terms so immediate echolalia refers to when they imitate you immediately so today after school I had an IEP meeting was actually an evaluation results meeting where we gave out the educational label of autism to this little boy and he had throughout the testing process and then even when we were playing um before we had the meeting anything I would say he would say and some kids will just imitate or Echo one word so you might say um come here and they might say here or you might say do you want to eat and they might say eat or want eat so sometimes they um Echo the end of the phrase so it just depends some kids as they're able to Output more words then they might respond they might um Echo the entire phrase so at first when you have this immediate delay I think a lot of times you notice it because you might have a flash card and you might say say dog and what do they say you guys tell me in the comments it's going to take a second for it to come through but if I say say dog if they are have immediate echolalia they're gonna say what they're gonna say say dog and a lot of times they even imitate your intonation yes Jill you got it so those kids can yes oh you guys are geniuses see it you know way more about Gestalt language processing than you think you do okay you guys have it like everyone has it exactly um or someone says you know what's your name and then you try to prompt them like okay Say Elliot and they might say Say Elliot if they don't say what's your name um so those are a couple examples of immediate echolalia let me know in the comments do you have kids like this is it like your whole class your whole case load um my morning class I have all students who are autistic uh so yeah this is this is the whole morning lots of echolalia now delayed echolalia refers to utterances that are repeated with a significant delay so this is for me what feels like a lot of times kids have heard it and learned it and then they kind of start bringing it back into play later or kids that have like that processing time so maybe it was kind of uh something they heard earlier in the day and then all of a sudden you hear them saying it later like they're kind of practicing it or repeating it but it's later in the day but more often I noticed delayed echolalia when it's something that has been said to the child a lot and they are using it to explain what's going on um or calm themselves so this is best uh with an example so I had a student once who the in the integrated preschool classroom the teacher was saying she seems sad but she kept saying are you okay are you okay and what we found out then is that what I mean that one was pretty easy to guess that's what Mom said to her when she was sad or upset are you okay oh it's okay baby it's okay and so when they're doing that we're going to talk a little bit about pronoun reversals but that's why those pronoun reversals happen is they're saying it how it was said to them so of course they're not saying I'm okay or are they say are you okay not I'm sad I'm hurting um the other one and this was I have like a little graphic for this because it was so great this happened a couple weeks ago in my classroom and I have this student that loves songs loves nursery rhymes we can't Chit Chat and have a conversation uh with her verbal speech but she can say a lot of words but she has a lot of the delayed echolalia but the awesome thing is she's starting to use these chunks or gestalts in appropriate times so for example we were I was sitting going to work with her and she came over to me and she went to sit on the chair and she missed the chair and she fell on the ground and it wasn't a far way to fall but she boom she fell on the ground and she looked up at me and she said We All Fall Down now do you guys know what that's from thank you you're probably if you don't know right away You're gonna be like oh yeah I know what that's from but she said it just like the song We All Fall Down and so it was her way yeah Megan Ring Around the Rosie so it was her way of letting me know I fell down but she didn't have that novel language to let me know she didn't have that self-generated language to let me know right so she used this chunk and does she know what we means that it's more than one person no does she know fall down she probably kind of knows that but she she didn't know how to just uh come up with a novel sentence with that right that's what I'm trying to say so she used that chunk to let me know and I thought it was genius and amazing so she said We All Fall Down and I said oh yeah you fell down uh so let me know in the comments do you have any of those like pieces of songs or phrases that kids have heard somewhere else that you hear them say a lot that you could maybe think and go oh sometimes you go I what is that from and a lot of times if you ask the parents they know exactly what it's from and what the meaning is so ask parents because they're our best detectives with that once we figure out like kind of what it's from we can work with it and I'll give you a couple examples of that um so in the beginning with echolalia the children learn chunks of language and so that's where they're singing the entire songs or entire phrases so they might come up to you and say do you want to go outside and they don't mean me they mean that they want to go outside but that is the sentence or the chunk of language that the adult usually uses with them so they have memorized it and to them it basically means like outside get me outside right so they say that whole chunk um people used to think that echolalia was meaningless and purposeless but over the years research shows that many times a lot of times it does have meaning and it just might not be super apparent to us right from the start what the meaning is and so that's where I'm saying we need to be detectives with people that know the child best to kind of figure out what do some of these gestalts chunks of language delayed echolalia what do they mean Amanda said we have a little boy whose mom often says get into your car seat so when he wants to go home he tells us get into your car seat yes oh my gosh Amanda that is the best example so someone that doesn't know him and isn't familiar with him and maybe doesn't know autism as well might be like what is he talking about there is no car seat here we're not in a car but you guys know what it means and you can build on it and use it so that's fantastic I love that example okay so here is the little visual of We All Fall Down so a Gestalt language processor they learn the chunks versus the individual words and here um I don't know if you can read it it's kind of small but the Gestalt language processor used the chunk of language from Ring Around the Rosie and when he fell down he says We All Fall Down and an analytic language processor uses self-generated either single words or combining the two words or a short phrase and he might say fall down or I fall down so you can kind of see the difference there uh Lindsay said my son's way to greet people is to say welcome to the show oh my gosh I wish that I could hear how he says that is it super animated or is it just a welcome to the show I would love to hear that okay so this is what I feel is so fun and exciting about my job and the kids that I work with they learn differently right so there's not just one way of learning language uh the way that all the tests are normed on and that we're used to is that analytic language processor that way of learning language but there's just more and more information coming out with the neurodiversity movement that supports children who are autistic a lot of times most of the time our Gestalt language processors and so what we want to ask is like how can we better support them instead of trying to get them to fit the mold of how typical children learn how can we support them in the way that they learn best and Lindsay said same Cadence as he hears it on TV welcome to the show I love it maybe I'll say that every time I start my Facebook lives okay so what is a Gestalt so you're going to hear a lot of terms like he's a Gestalt language processor or Gestalt language processing or just Gestalt like oh that's a Gestalt so that might be something we would have referred before to as oh I think that was delayed echolalia well a Gestalt is that a chunk of language that the child has stored into their memory for later use welcome to the show right that is a chunk and it's stored in the memory for later use and then when kids start using it at those times that are appropriate like Lindsay's son like greeting people man I just think that's fascinating and so smart and clever so one person you're going to want to follow it's uh Alexandria I don't know how to say her last name zacos or zakos she is an SLP like me but she worked uh was a mentee under Marge LeBlanc and she did all this work many years ago in Gestalt language processing and so Alexandria has a course out right now called the meaningful speech course and if you want to learn more about it you can go to this website meaningfulspeech.com and read about it but I've taken her course and I love it and if you want to dive in really deep and get lots of support with it she is a great resource so definitely check her out okay so I'm going to give you some examples from my classroom with Gestalt language processing and some of these have happened this week and one of them was actually today so these are super recent examples so this picture of this little guy with the Legos and the or the duplos and the dog he is a little guy that uh he he does not like going into the gym we have a little gym and a big gym and it's maybe sensory or maybe like I don't know what's going on with this place I want to get to the room and play with all my favorite toys so yesterday I thought you know we've honored when he says we say gym class I'm showing the picture and then we can tell by his body language um or kind of pushing it away he does not want to go so I've been honoring it and showing in the all done picture and he says all done and then we just move on and do something else for him someone stays back with him well yesterday I thought well we were playing with these duplos the other day and he really liked them maybe we could just play with duplos in the gym to just kind of get used to being in that room so and I wasn't going to push it if you didn't want to but he followed me with those right into the gym and we were playing with him on the floor and I started building a tower and I can't remember exactly how it started I may have started this because I knew he loved the song Hickory Dickory Dock and you guys let me know in the comments if you guys are your kids all obsessed with the Super Simple Songs Hickory Dickory Dock where the elephants at the end and he like makes the the clock smash into a bunch of pieces okay so the anticipation with that song is the best and I you're gonna hear me talk about it a couple times tonight because uh a lot of my students right now really love it so he's down there I build this Tower and I say oh it's the clock Hickory Dickory Dock and he grabbed the little uh dog that goes with the duplos and he said monkey and I said oh you want it to be the monkey that goes up the clock okay so I sang Hickory Dickory Dock and all of a sudden we're in the gym where he doesn't normally like to be and he's got this big smile on his face and he knows what's coming he knows we are gonna do the whole Hickory Dickory Dock thing so this is where his Gestalt with the chunks of that song he loved it so much and is so familiar with it that he was able to even kind of pretend that the dog was a monkey so he went Hickory Dickory Dock the monkey went up the clock the Clock Struck One thing down he run Hickory Dickory Dock and then we got another uh character and pretended it was the elephant and then we made the tower fall down so this is like a little example of how you can kind of use some of those gestalts uh some of those big chunks those songs that you know that they love and expand on it so we didn't literally have a clock a grandfather clock like he was allowing me to pretend with the Legos the duplos and he even he on his own was able to change the character not all kids could do that from the dog to the monkey and he didn't sing along but he could add in a word if I left it out so Hickory Dickory Dock the anigo monkey went up the clock and we played that several times and we just had the best time so that is one way you can kind of use and expand on some of their favorite things okay another with Hickory Dickory docks I told you this is the favorite right now so I have this little girl and she is just loves loves loves that song so I have this Cactus and we were putting the flowers in the cactus and kind of working on numbers and stuff and I took the little mouse that we had she grabbed for the bucket of animals stuffed animals that I have and figurines and so she grabbed this mouse and I took it and I said Hickory Dickory Dock the and one of our things we were working on was animals and animal sounds like labeling them now with her if I would hold up a flash card of a mouse and say what is it she it's not motivating to her it's not meaningful to her some kids are great with like labeling flashcards to kind of just build a base of uh vocabulary but she is not one she could care less and probably with that direction that I'm giving like what is it she either tuned it out or doesn't know what I want her to do so I go with his Cactus and we're we're using a cactus instead of a clock Hickory Dickory Dock the mouse went up the cactus the cactus poked him out so then we're working on exclamatory words the mouse ran down Hickory Dickory Dock Tick Tock but I'm using it all within one of her gestalts that she loves then she pulled out the next animal and gave it to me so I'd say Hickory Dickory Dock the horse she said horse ran up the clock so she was able to name all those animals and it was within this kind of relationship-based play-based activity that she loved so you guys let me know in the comments do you see this kind of thing working for any students in particular do any students pop into your mind where you could kind of use this kind of Gestalt language processing to teach skills even like just to expand on their favorite songs okay this one is not this example is not a song but this was a student that I had last year and he would we would come to work and he would say we do an activity and then maybe we'd start a second one and whenever we figured out later whenever the activity was kind of hard for him he would say goodbye see you later goodbye see you later and at first it's kind of out of context like what's he talking about what is you know oh you know people might think well that's meaningless delayed echolalia meaningless well we figured out pretty quickly he's saying I want to be done with this like it's either I don't like this activity I don't understand it but in any case I want to be done with this activity and so for us to be able to honor that is if he was saying no and then we can use visuals to model like all done or something like that honor it I as an educator can adjust the activity for the next time so that it's not as hard for him and causing him that stress response so the goodbye see you later maybe came out without a lot of emotion the first time but as he said it each time he said it over and over you could hear the stress in his voice so it was definitely uh hey this is too much I can't do this and I think that we need to honor that more in the classroom and throw away the idea of like oh he's just getting away with not doing it like we need to throw that out the window and go how can I make this make better sense to him or be more engaging to him and oftentimes that is Maybe decreasing the difficulty or using some special interests to make it more motivating to him right okay so this one was just today and you guys are gonna love it okay so this little girl she was the one that liked the Hickory Dickory Dock in the cactus and I'm taking no credit for this one because I have a para who did a phenomenal job this is one of those things that's really hard to teach like as a educator or an SLP to teach other people to kind of intuitively do but this para did it and I was all over her like this is amazing let me take a video of this so I can show other other people so I can't show the video on here but I'm showing my other pairs so they kind of get an idea but this little girl loves Mommy finger Mommy finger where are you here I am here I am how do you do excuse my singing my musician husband does not think I'm a good singer in cringes so it's all good right Opposites attract so anyway she loves Mommy finger Mommy finger that whole song and she'll sing it over and over so the para saying that with her several times and then pulled out these animals and she put one on each finger and said duck finger duck finger where are you here I am here I am how do you do after they did it once this little girl wanted to do it over and over again this is the one the little girl if you held up any of these and said what is it she probably is not gonna answer but does she know what each of these animals are yes because she was labeling them during her song which was a Gestalt it was her favorite song but she was starting she's starting to be able to change or mitigate some of the words in it so swapping out those words that's that next step for kids that are open to it and ready so she went over and over you know horse finger horse finger where are you here I am here I am how do you do she was having the best time and I was so proud of my para she did such a good job with it okay this one's a little bit of a personal story so the picture of the two boys on Halloween are my son Nate and he's in the camo shirt and my first kindergarten student ever when I started working with autistic children in 1999 so they have been trick-or-treating together you know all through Elementary they are now uh Willie the little Buzz Lightyear there my first kindergartner he's 29 years old now and he still comes trick-or-treating at my house so that is him in the shark costume from last night he came he was the first trick-or-treater to come to my new house that I moved into last month so Willy though whenever he sees Nate uh my son and whenever he hears his name he says what will happen if Nate puts the weights in the pool and he'll say this to people that don't really know him or know Nate or know what that's about but if someone was to do some detective work and ask me like what does that mean I know exactly what it means and it's his way of starting conversation so he doesn't say like hey how's Nate doing right that self-generated speech is still hard but if he says what will happen if Nate puts the weights in the pool it's a way that he gets conversation going with me and sometimes it's how he I think is asking about Nate his childhood friend and so do you guys want to know what it means let me know in the comments okay so when they were little Willie has an indoor pool in his house and so I would bring a Nate over and they would swim together and they used to drop weights in the pool like little dumbbells they'd drop the weights in the pool and then they dive down and get them they both could swim underwater really well so they would dive down and get them and bring them up well one time the liner of the pool ripped and it's an in-ground pool the liner ripped and they had to get the liner replaced so after that the rule was no more weights in the pool you can't put weights in the pool and I think a lot of these uh gestalts or like chunks or phrases that kids remember for a very long time are often emotionally charged right so for that that was a big deal to in Willy's life because he had to like not go in the pool for a while because they had to redo the whole liner so it was a big deal like Willy no more weights in the pool so they got the new liner filled it back up at some point we came back over had no clue we had no clue about the the liner ripping or any of that for some reason the weights were still in that pool area so what did my son do he went and put the weights in the pool right away and to Willy like it was probably shocking because Nate just broke the rule well Nate didn't know the rule but Willie's like what will happen if Nate puts the weights in the pool and the answer is it will Rip the liner so that's his connection to Nate and I think because it was so emotionally charged for him that's what he's always going to remember uh his association with Nate after all those years of playing together that's the big thing that stands out to him and it's how we get he gets conversation going so pretty cute huh okay so we're getting towards the end here but who are Gestalt language processors so most autistic children are Gestalt language processors and while all kids at some point repeat others when they're developing language they quickly move on to using single words to communicate and more of that self-generated speech so here are the three signs that I promised you but it was kind of a lot of precursor to get to this echolalia like we've talked about a young child who is immediately echoing echoing and has echolalia um what is said to them or at least the last part of what's said to them is most likely a Gestalt language processor so that's one of your signs sign number two you can probably guess this after everything I talked about tonight too all Toddlers and preschool lawyers sing songs uh however if you have a student who's not using verbal speech to communicate what they want with you to chit chat to let you know what they don't want but they can sing entire songs or engage in scripting you can hear them sometimes it's jargon at first where you're like I don't understand what they're saying but it sounds like speech like they might not be able to articulate because they're young all of the sounds uh or the words that they're wanting to say but a lot of times the jargon that sounds like speech is from something we just can't understand it yet so if you have kids scripting even if it's jargon uh they're probably a Gestalt language processor and number three the third sign that you have a Gestalt language processor on your hands is are those pronoun reversals and so this happens when they use that delayed echolalia and a parent might say you're okay honey you're okay and then when the child's at school and they're sad they might say you're okay honey or you're okay baby and the people around them might be saying like who are they talking to like yeah I'm okay I'm okay and they're using the pronoun they heard when this was said to them and so in this case they're probably trying to self soothe and if that's the case co-regulation is going to help like you take their cue and soothe them like they're kind of asking you to um but they're not talking about another person around them when they're saying you they're talking about themselves okay so some other places you can learn more Barry present have you guys heard his name yes or no and have you read or listened to his book uniquely human I'm in the middle of the audiobook because I like listening on the way to and from work he has so much good information not just about Gestalt language processing but anything and everything when it comes to autism the neurodiversity movement um being really relationship focused and child-led like he has done years and years of research and his stuff is amazing so check out his book or audiobook I will link it in the comments after we're done here um I talked to you about Alexandria's meaningful speech course that's another good one and then there is a book by Marge LeBlanc which is where Alexandria got a lot of her uh education on this topic it's called natural language acquisition in Gestalt language so I'll be sure to put the uh link to that in the comments too Lindsay said she started the book uniquely human and she likes the podcast so there is a podcast too by I'll try to find that and Link it for you too so these are all great uh people to learn from and you can also learn more by following these two people on Instagram uh play underscore Spark she is an SLP and she has such great stuff about Gestalt language processing on Instagram and Tick Tock so check her out take a screenshot if you need to and follow meaningful speech on Instagram so she's got a lot of stuff too okay now before I tell you what we're going to talk about next week let me know in the comments was this helpful did it clear it up a little bit for you to kind of help muddle through this uh terminology the Gestalt language processing um I do have a blog post that goes along with this I'll link that in the comments too but uh I hope I gave you a little place to start um and when I talked about the echolalia and delayed echolalia you probably realize like you know more than you do it's just a different name for it and uh one of the things that was kind of nowhere for me over the last couple years is the idea of kids learning language in different ways and it's okay so you can be an analytic language processor or a gestational language processor okay you guys I'm so glad that I'm hearing it's helpful reach out if you have any questions um Monica said I miss the first part can we watch and listen on replay yes so it's going to be on YouTube and on Facebook sometimes it's easier to find on YouTube um and it's just autism Little Learners on YouTube and I am going to start if this worked broadcasting these lives to Facebook and YouTube at the same time and then it's just there on YouTube for the replay so go to YouTube to autism Little Learners and hit the subscribe so that you get any updates if there's like a new training that pops up that you missed on Facebook um Stacy I don't have these explanations in written form but maybe I can come up with like a one-pager uh to help out with that I will write that down and think about it tonight see how I can support you with that okay next week I will be talking about five ways that you can increase joint attention in your autistic child or students so we know forcing or making goals about eye contact is out but we still want our kids to reference us and have shared enjoyment and Joint attention with us so how are we going to do that let me know are you interested in this topic is this something that would be helpful to take away five kind of actionable things you can put into practice at home or in your classroom um and I am going to be working on that this week and have it ready for you next week all right oh good Elizabeth I'm glad okay you guys in the comments I'm gonna go and put those links in shortly and then man I talked for a long time today it was supposed to be a half hour and here we are at almost 45 minutes so this is a big topic um let me know in the comments too would you like more on this topic in particular okay I'm gonna go have a great week and I will see you same time same place next week on Tuesday