If you’ve been with us the last few weeks, you know we have been chatting about imitation skills. We are moving right along in our hierarchy of imitation, and today we will be discussing imitating exclamatory and symbolic words! That’s right. At this stage, our children will be producing words! It’s exciting, I know. Personally, this is my favorite level of imitation to work on as parent’s are motivated, kids are engaged, and real progress is seen. Not so long along, our kiddies were unable to imitate actions and now they’re making words!
Exclamatory words and symbolic words are similar, but differ in the meaning behind the words. Exclamatory words are short, easy to produce words that are associated with an action or object and naturally occur in everyday speech. Examples include saying ‘uh oh’, ‘aww’, ‘ow’, etc. Symbolic sounds are short, east to produce words, that imitate the sounds they represent. Examples include animal sounds “moo”, environmental sounds “knock-knock”, and vehicle sounds “brum”.
Exclamatory and symbolic words are words may be produced with meaning and can represent emotion. These words are typically easier to imitate than true words, but can still be used for multiple pragmatic purposes such as commenting, protesting, and questioning. Do not discount the communicative intent behind the production of these words. Your child is giving you a message!
For parents or therapists of late talkers, this is a great stage to start at when working on imitation. Many of those children have the foundational skills of imitating, but are unable to imitate at the word level. I like to tell my client’s parents to think of these as ‘pop out’ words. Sometimes when we are feeling a strong emotion (e.g. pain) these words ‘pop out’ (e.g. ow!). There is less cognitive demand when producing exclamatory and symbolic words, which makes it easier for our little ones. As the adult model, it is so important to be silly and fun in this stage. It’s pretty hard to model “Hooray!” when being serious. Use heightened affect and exaggerated emotion when modeling. Make sure your facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice match the words.
Similar to the previous step, model a small amount of words, many times. Rather than modeling 10 different animal sounds, model 2-3 across different settings. Pick sounds that are already in your child’s repertoire. If your child makes a lot of “oo-ing” sounds, model “moo”. Do this across multiple settings such as playing with a toy cow, reading a book about cows, doing a cow puzzle, and using a cow puppet. Let’s get talking!
Talk soon, Kim
Kommentare