Rapid Automatic Naming & Word Retrieval - how to remedi

I can’t answer your specific questions, but would like to make a suggestion for you to consider. Call the psychologist today and have her fax you the scores immediately. Once you receive them you can post them here for views of the several knowledgeable people on these boards. You may even get views on things they have found successful in addressing the problems of kids with a similar profile. This will give you a lot of insights that will allow you to make the most of the time of your consultation with the psychologist. If you go in without the scores, let alone any idea of what they may signify, you will end up spending the whole time having that explained to you instead of discussing the pros and cons of different remediation approaches.

If I understand my professional reading (I admit that sometimes scientific studies are challenging to read), we need to know how this effects him. The greatest probability is that it effects his reading speed. Is he a very slow reader?

FYI, in countries with a regular orthography, one sound for one letter, the phonological processing deficit is not as prominent, the RAN deficit is the primary differentiator in LD.

So, the 121 on phonological awareness is a good start.

The best way to remediate this MAY be with a program like Great Leaps. Ken Campbell, the author, sometimes posts here. This program exposes the student to: phonics probes, phrases probes and story probes, all in increasing difficulty. The student completes timed readings each day until a desired rate/accuracy is achieved, before moving to the next probe. This method has been shown to be more effective than programs like Read Naturally that expose the student to taped readings and also use timed readings.

A discussion of where the whole RAN deficit originates is an interesting one. For the younger children it seems the best way to try to avoid serious fluency issues later on is via teaching children orthographic patterns by prominently displaying the patterns so the students SEE the patterns clearly and simultaneously engaging in segmentation activities to relate the orthographic unit to its pronunciation. So, we teach patterns and have students dissect the patterns, working with manipulatives like letter tiles in the beginning stages.

My upper graders seem to have, usually, seemingly undue difficulty extracting the “correct” patterns from multi-syllabic words.

So, I recommend a program like Great Leaps, it can be done in less than 10 minutes of 1:1 per day. You can purchase it yourself very inexpensively if you are not able to get the school on board with you quickly enough.

Hi Laura,
Just checking in to offer support. I don’t have concrete scores, but we just had our son’s reading re-tested. I think we have similar problems. As you know I’ve been doing great leaps with him all summer, although we lost steam as school approached. I think it helped with fluency, but its a long haul. Hang in there.

Try posting the actual scores on the Parenting a Child with LD board. If he has good phonemic awareness and high verbal fluency, I suspect a visual processing disorder as the basis for the trouble reading. It will also screw up ability to learn sight words and spelling. I’d look at www.vision3d.org for ideas on what to look for and referrals to developmental optometrists. PACE, and Audiblox both are somewhat helpful in terms of improving processing speed and have a significant visual processing component. Audiblox is much cheaper.

With respect to RAN and word retrieval, the thing I have found most helpful is deliberately teaching the child multiple ways to cross classify words and to analyze sentence and paragraph structure. Study of syntax and analogies and how they are related to the meaning of sentences and of words and paragraphs seem to help my kid build up her reading comprehension after we got done laying the decoding, fluency, and visualization components of the reading pyramid. For example, think of the words whale, elephant, T-Rex, giraffe, & shrew: How do you classify them? You could group (1) elephant, whale, giraffe & shrew by classifying them as mammals, or modern day animals. You could group (2) elephant, giraffe, whale, T-Rex by classifying them as big animals. You could group (3) T-Rex’s and shrews by classifying them as meat eaters. Or think of the word leg. Clearly this is a part of something. Is it part of a person? Part of a chair? There are lots of different ways in which word relationships can be classified: synonyms (small/little), antonyms (white/black), part:whole (leg/dog), member of a group (elephant/giraffe): location (Nigeria/Africa), etc. It is important because you make use of your knowledge of analogies and syntax every time you figure out the meaning of words from context. Take the sentence “The Mahaweli Ganga begins in the misty mountains of Taprobane.” You probably figured that the Mahaweli Ganga is a river or a highway, or a procession or maybe a story of some sort, and you would be correct. (Ha ha, bet you thought I’d tell you what it was outright.) How did you do it? First you knew that this unknown phrase pertained to something INSIDE a definable geographic region. Maybe you never heard of Taprobane (an older name for the modern-day nation of Sri Lanka.) Still, you knew it had to be a geographically identifiable region because it had mountains. You knew what “misty” was, but even if you didn’t, you could figure that from the word’s location in the sentence it had to be an adjective describing the mountains (syntax.) Using your knowledge of analogies based on location, you figured that Mahaweli Ganga meant a river, road or cultural activity. You automatically eliminated a city as the meaning of the phrase on the basis of the syntax: the use of the word “begins” as opposed to “began”, and you automatically eliminated “mountain” as the meaning because it already was located in a mountain. You knew from the syntax that it had to be something which could move either literally or figuratively. If the next sentence went on to say “It crosses seven great dams” you would know it was a road or a procession, and not a river or a story. (If the next sentence had said “Seven great dams impede its progress” you would have known it was a river without further ado because only rivers are slowed down by dams. Rivers are crossed (syntax) by dams; they cannot cross them. Stories don’t HAVE dams.) If, on the other hand, the second sentence had begun “Buddhist priests convey the sacred relic to the waiting elephant” you would have known that it was a cultural activity of some sort because this sentence makes no sense in the context of a river or a road, and the sentences in paragraphs have to be related. If the second sentence had began “The heroine, a personification of the corn goddess” you would know it was a story because only stories have heroines. BTW, Ganga means river. As a good reader you probably do all this automatically without thinking about it. Some children, on the other hand, need this stuff explained and the reasoning process laid out repeatedly in reading practice, and need to have extensive isolated skill drill on grammar, syntax, and analogies as well in order to automate those subskills. Just saying “Well, what does the CONTEXT tell you what the word must be doesn’t cut it”.

She’s on the money here. This is an excellent (albeit lengthy :-)) post on RAN.

Now, if the child is also reading slowly, I might, like Anyita, go for Great Leaps to help with that (a separate issue, really, than RAN even though there is overflow at times.)

Linguisystems has some interesting naming remedial products
www.linguisystems.com
And, we may yet see something from Dr. Wolf and the RAVE-O product.

Couple of other websites out there. One by a Dr. Diane German (as memory serves). Good information.

BTW, the hubby is incorrect. Those numbers are statistically possible. I wouldn’t burst his bubble over it though.

That’s a good suggestion. I called the psychologist and left her a message asking if I can get a list of those scores. I had asked about getting a report, but she recommended that I wait… just in case I wanted more testing.

Hi Anitya,
Yes, my son is a VERY slow reader. This is his most obvious difficulty. He gets hung up on the simplest words. And if he doesn’t read a lot on a daily basis he’ll begin to “forget” how to read.

I did Reading Reflex with him and this helped somewhat, but he still has great difficulty.

I’ve heard of Great Leaps, but wasn’t sure if I should try doing something like Audiblox or Brain Skills first (to try and build overall processing speed). Also, I wasn’t sure if IM would help with processing speed..but I’ve been thinking of that as well.

One thing I recently done is created a timed reading list of words my son seems to have difficulty with. For example, I created a random word list with words similar to this:
“this was a saw and where saw this a was where and..etc…”
limiting 6 words over about 3 sentences for each word grouping. At this point I’m just trying to get him to read these over smoothly without pausing (trying to get it automatic). And then I’ll start timing him and try to get his speed up.

A few months ago I was doing timed reading with SRA books. I liked these because they use a lot of word pattern repetition.
Maybe I should start doing this again…

Thanks for the support! I don’t know what I’d do without you and and all the great people on this board. Sometimes this all seems so overwhelming.

Hi Shirin,
My son does not have good verbal fluency (he did as a baby, but not now). besides reading slowly, he speaks slowly and often has difficulty finding words. He has an impossible time with verbal reports, remembering names, events, etc…

For example, the other day he asked me what he had for breakfast. He then told me that he was suppose to write about it in school, but couldn’t do the assignment because he couldn’t remember what he had eaten earlier that day. He spent the whole time sitting there trying to remember what he ate! After he told me this I asked him what he ate for breakfast that morning (about 10 minutes earlier!). He told me he could remember what it looked like but he couldn’t remember what it was called!!! It was oatmeal and I even remember announcing to my kids that I was giving them oatmeal for breakfast. Anyhow, I later learned from the teacher that the assignment was not about breakfast, but what he ate for dinner!!!! (Yikes!). Anyhow, I’m REALLY worried about my son.

The one thing that makes me question visual processing is his visual perceptual quotient was 121 (92%ile) on the TVPS-R last year. Although processing and perception aren’t the same, I wonder how a person could develop strong visual perceptual skills with visual processing problems…this I just don’t know enough about…

I’ve been thinking about trying Audiblox, but wasn’t sure if it would help with this particular set of areas that need remediation. Particularly processing speed. Have you tried it?

I did take my son to a PACE provider who tested him and told me he didn’t need the program because his scores were above age level. However, another person recently looked at the scores and felt he might be a good candidate because there was a large variation.

Your suggestions here are GREAT!!!! I’m printing your post and plan to start using the ideas right away. My son has a book report to do which is just about impossible, but we’re going to do the best we can. I think your ideas may help.

Thank you for taking so much time to share this. I really appreciate it!

Hi Susan,
I did happen to see the Linguisystems products and also found some from parrot software too. Have you ever used any of these products or heard anything about them?

I’m also waiting to find out when RAVE-O will be available. If only I could just offer my child as a test subject! ;-)

So being in the 1%ile is possible? That definitely has me a little worried. I’m wondering how my son can function in a classroom with scores that low. Right now he has no help, intervention…nothing!

Laura,

An easy place to start with categorizing is using the game Blurt. It asks for items in a category. We do it in a noncompetitive manner—taking turns.

We also have had success with improving word retrieval and reading fluency with Neuronet. (http://www.neuronetonline.com/) It is not widely available though. But it has really been life changing for him—his working memory, for example is much much improved.. For my son, a lack of fluency is based in visual- verbal integration which Neuronet targets. This has been a very difficult issue for him to resolve and we made a big jump after doing Interactive Metronome. Interactive Metronome didn’t take him there but it seemed to help break through some walls we had reached with Neuronet. (We really saw nice results with IM also—and it is widely available).

We found PACE to be unhelpful in resolving these issues. My son’s problems are very sensory-motor based and therapies that address that level (as opposed to the cognitive like PACE and Audiblox) have been most effective. My son may not be typical though so I would hesitate to generalize from our experiences. (He has been diagnosed with both visual and auditory based deficits, sensory integration, and word retrieval).

Beth

My son does not have good verbal fluency (he did as a baby, but not now). besides reading slowly, he speaks slowly and often has difficulty finding words. He has an impossible time with verbal reports, remembering names, events, etc…

What is his auditory and visual memory like? How many numbers can he remember if you recite a nonsense string of numbers? (Normal is 7 numbers forward, and 3 backward, which is why telephone numbers are the way they are.) How about if the numbers are written down? What is his short-term memory like? If you tell him the names of 3 objects (dog, street, pen) and then ask him for them five minutes later, can he do it? (Most people can remember
five). If the problem is primarily auditory memory, and verbal language skills, then I’d think about doing Fast Forword with him www.scilearn.com. If he has both, then YES, he does have a visual processing problem as well, and I would get him that evaluation. Sometimes what happens is that people are pretty much intact visually for distance vision, but get convergence spasm with near focus work (like reading.) This allows them to develop excellent visual perception abilities and to handle short bursts of reading, but they poop out very early when expected to handle a page or two of print and have trouble learning sight words.

I haven’t tried Audiblox myself. Actually, I got the materials, and it is a very good approach for improving memory and for sight word recognition, but at that point my kid’s memory and fluency was okay, and she was doing PACE with her language therapist and vision therapy, and so I just gave the materials to her language therapist to be used with some other kid. However the approach might be useful to your child, especially since he is still stuck on the fluency aspect of things (which is why I suspect a visual problem. He most likely does have an auditory and/or langauge one as well or he would be less scatterbrained with verbal commands. ) Audiblox does have a pretty good fluency component and you seem to be at that stage of the pyramid.

Another thing that you might want to do besides Great Leaps and overlearning the Dolch list words as you seem to be trying to do in your other post, is to help him automatically recognize word chunks. This is a good thing to do after basic decoding has been established, and you seem to have gotten past that step. I forget the name of the technique, but I have about 110 lists of about ten words each which focus on different word chunks, e.g. for EA, (Peace, treated, reveal, peas, repeat, impeach, peaches, and so on. The idea is to automatically pick out these chunks no matter where in the word they appear. Goal was to be able to read ten words in 10 seconds, I think; I’d have to look it up. I’d be glad to email you the lists; I’m pretty sure I have them somewhere around. I think I also have the first 600 Dolch list words somewhere around (the 600 most commonly used words in elementary school aged books), and I can send you a copy of that too.

nt

I came across this presentation which is from the perspective of the SLP.

www.bciu.k12.pa.us/specialed/specificprograms/ slprograms/special-projects/Word.ppt

Helen

I enjoyed reading your reply. If you get the chance can you send me the Dolsh list also?

I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Reggie

I picked up the full test scores. There’s quite a few scores in the norm so there isn’t as wide a swing as I thought, but if anyone can help me understand these scores better I’d truly appreciate it. Thanks! :-)

Woodcock Johnson III Cognitive Abilities

Verbal 101
Thinking 135
Cog Efficiency 104

Comp Knowlege 101
L-T Retrieval 113
Vis-Spatial think 115
Auditory Processing 157
Fluid Reasoning 120
Process Speed 93
Short-Term Memory 113

Phonemic Aware 147
Working Memory 97
Broad Attention 97
Cognitive Fluency 71 (3%ile)
Exec Process 106

Verbal Comprehension 109
Visual Auditory Learn 124
Spatial Relations 114
Sound Blending 162
Concept Formation 122
Visual Matching 89
Numbers Reversed 92
Incomplete Words 101
Auditory Working mem 107
Gen Information 94
Retrieval Fluency 80 (9%ile)
Picture Recognition 110
Auditory Attention 119
Analysis Synthesis 115
Decision Speed 102
Memory for Words 129
Rapid Picture Naming 65 (1%ile)
Planning 113
Pair Cancellation 86 (17%ile)

Does anyone know what “Pair Cancellation” is???

Pair Cancellation is a timed test where the task is to scan rows of three pictures that are randomly repeated, and circle each instance of the target pair. The WJIII is a complex test that we had interpreted by a private psych….it’s computer scored so the cluster scores are not just simple addition of subtests; ask the person who gave it to interpret it for you; you also may want specific tests of reading like the WJreading Mastery tests or the Gray Oral Reading Test to assess reading ability.

Would you be able to expand on the Convergence Spasm? or know where I can read more about it? symptoms, how to correct etc.?

Do you absolutely need vision therapy to correct? or can you do anything at home?

I’m suspecting my dd might have some of this going on? We haven’t had a real thorough visual perceptual exam, but we did see a DO who does vision therapy(and PACE) and he checked convergence. Supposedly she was ok. But I think there might be more too it than what our exam stated.

I attach a URL, http://www.vision-therapy.com/vt_research_studies.htm and suggest a Google search on COnvergence Spasm and Learning Disorder. The most marked symptom in my daughter (whose visual processing disorder got identified at the fluency stage of the game) was that she used her neck to read instead of her eyes. Even though she was a pretty good athlete and could catch and pitch well in Little League, she read by holding her eyes still and moving her head. When we held her head still, she couldn’t read; her eye muscles were that poor at near focus. Other signs are tearing, itching, burning, visual fatigue, and headache. Yes, there are things you can do at home. Try A+ Vision, http://www.howtolearn.com/vision.html which I bought, and which include a lot of the home exercises not involving lenses, prisms or other complex equipment which my kid used in vision therapy. However, the research suggests that a combo of in-office and home exercises are about 60-70 percent effective, and that in-office alone is about 40 percent effective, and home exercises alone is about 30 percent effective.

Pair cancellation is a factor in processing speed (attention and concentration). It requires the examinee to visually scan pictures, identify instances of a repeated pattern and circle to respond. There is, as you can read, a small amount motor skill involved. If the child has very slow motor reponse, it *could* affect the outcome of this subtest.

The WJ-III is not an examination for which answers may be blurted without thought. It is fairly new and very complex. It does, though, give some interesting information about the examinee.

I need to think about this for awhile and do some reading about it.

There’s another really good motor/visual therapy book. It’s called Developing Your Child for Success.” Apparently, I need to start using it regularly!

It was written by Dr. Lane and you can find their website by searching on Google. The book is also very reasonably priced.

I had a big answer all formatted and neat—my computer crashed and it was gone. Nice that.

Basically, I’m missing some information on the three big scores: verbal, thinking, and cognitive efficiency. I need the manual and don’t have it. Perhaps someone else will look in.

Shirin, I think, answered on these same test scores. She’s on the right track with the visual scanning/ processing; however, I see a potentially significant Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN) problem, also.

This is no light-weight subject. Naming problems make really bright kids (like yours) look slow and not-so-bright. He looks like he processes spoken words *very* quickly but written words slowly. Trying to retrieve them is a different story, though. How frustrating this must be for such a bright kid.

There are some other things going on, too, but they are too subtle for me to evaluate without my graphs and charts of what tests feed into what clusters and Broad Factors. I don’t have any of that at home. Will try to find and post later.

I haven’t used any of the visual discrimination remedies mentioned on these BB’s. I can help you investigate some RAN stuff. I’ll post some links & information as I find it.

Looks to be done by some SLP’s in their M.S. curriculum.

www.bciu.k12.pa.us/specialed/specificprograms/ slprograms/special-projects/Word.ppt

How frustrating! My computer is always crashing too and it drives me crazy. My husband keeps telling me to stay off Netscape, but I’m somewhat resistent to change.

Thank you for helping me with this!

Actually my son is slow with both written and spoken language. In fact, I suspected he might have CAPD because he has some of the characteristics (doesn’t seem to hear what’s being said). In order to strengthen his auditory skills I started having him listen to books on tape (at night just before he goes to bed) about two years ago. I also thought it might help with his language and vocabularly. He makes grammatical errors in speaking and I thought just listening to language might help. Maybe it did! His TAPS-R a year ago showed his auditory perceptual quotient to be average at 101.

The visual area has me stumped. Last year on the TVPS-R his visual perceptual quotient was 121. The lowest score was Form Constancy at 50%ile. So then I wondered can someone with very good visual perceptual skills have a visual processing problem and how does someone with visual processing problems develop good visual perceptual skills? Or are they unrelated?

If you do find any RAN information…especially remediation I’d really love to know about it. I could kick myself now for donating all those “picture” baby/toddler books that had 100s of objects. I was thinking that I should buy some of those books, paste them to index cards and have my son practice naming them quickly. Maybe have him do it to a metronome and then have him do it while jumping on a trampoline or doing some other activity.

Thank you again for your help!

Obviously, we both liked it enough to post it! Great minds…

I would guess that he’s processing it inbound pretty well, however, his retrieval and output are slowing him way down.
Does he get language services? I’m hearing you say that he has some semantic (grammar) issues, too. Has he been tested using the CELF-3 or CELF-R (or another very reliable test such as that series) within the last 3 years?
You can Earobics till the cows come home and it won’t help RAN. Helen’s has a post (and one of mine in another place—I know not where) has a .ppt file listed that is a good overview of RAN.

Now, on this visual processing thing. Like Central Auditory Processing (CAP), Central Visual Processing (CVP—my new made up acronym) can take several forms. A person might have excellent visual perceptual skills and have trouble scanning quickly. Others the opposite.

Others on the BB have used and seem to know more about remediating CVPD, so I’ll leave that to Shirin and crew.

What is amazing to me is all the different configurations these problems can come in. My son moves his head instead of his eyes!!! We have made much progress in therapy, but I have noticed that when pushed to do drills (with reading therapist), he starts to move his head again. Needless to say, we have nixed all timed drills, at least for now.

Beth

Hi Susan,
He did have the CLEF-R last year and his lowest score was 63%ile (in sentence structure, and concepts and directions).

Maybe he intellectually knows this, but in speaking (when he doesn’t have time to think) he will sometimes use the wrong tense? He does sometimes have difficulty with time and place. For example, about a year ago I remember we were driving on the freeway and there was a man parked on the side changing his tire. My son noticed him and about 5 minutes later said “Once I saw a guy on the freeway changing I his tire.” He was 7 at the time and this seemed very strange to me. But then, he has always seemed much younger than his age so often when he does these things I don’t notice.

Interestingly, he has a very dry and quirky sense of humor and recognizes humor well. His 2nd grade teacher once mentioned that she’d say something funny and he’d be the only one in class recognizing it. I asked the educational psychologist how this could be. How can someone who can barely memorize things or communicate his thoughts be quick-witted. She said it’s because he wasn’t using memory or trying to pull something from memory. I thought that was really interesting. The brain is fascinating.

///

Thanks - I will have to check that head vs. eye moving thing - I don’t know if she does that or not.

What is your ‘theory’ on weak visual imagery? (or lack there of?) What do you think causes that? Is it a developmental vision problem that can cause that? My dd has some strong visual perceptual skills, but she cannot ‘image’ things unless given a visual que (i.e. if presented auditorily). Words/sound symbol seem fall into that category for her.

I felt we made alot of progress with PACE/MTC, but she is not quite there yet.

///

See:
http://www.educationalpress.org/educationalpress/Index.asp