Word Retrieval

My son had severe word retrieval issues. He did have some therapy but what we did at home was be patient and try to help him when he clearly struggled for a word. We also did a lot of reading outloud to give him exposure to language and words.

The best source of information in this area is generally a speech pathologist. It is the sort of issue they deal with all the time in therapy. If you are looking for some games/activities you might look at the book “How to Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence” (LanguageWise) by the McGuinnesses of Reading Reflex fame. It has some good activities and user friendly, reasonable explanations. Focus on the ones dealing with categorization and visualization. Kids with word retrieval problems have the information most times, it is just poorly stored so that they have to take a loooong walk around their brain to find it. There is also a site about wordfinding that had some good infor- but the bookmark is on my work computer. I will find it and post if someone doesn’t get there first…

Robin

I have questions about Word Retrieval too. It is one of my son’s greatest challenges. It was mentioned to me by two different sources that a program called NeuroNet is one of the few programs that can help with this. I haven’t had a chance to investigate it much further. The website for NeuroNet is www.neuroacoustics.com.

I think the term for problems with word retrieval is dsynomia. It was a new term to me when I first read it on this bulliten board. You might want to do some searches for this term. Keep us posted on what you learn.

Rosie

Please do, Robin. I would love to know more about this.

http://www.wordfinding.com

If I had the brain space to think a little harder I probably wouldn’t have had to look:)

My son is doing the program that Rosie mentions. Word retreival is one of his issues but was not why we decided to do the program. We began the program because of auditory and sensory integration issues. My son has CAPD.

My understanding is that poor word retreival has a number of different causes, some of which are more amenable to remediation than others. My son scored very poorly on tests administered by slt at school—slow and inaccurate—in the bottom 5 %. I was told that he was inefficient at word retrieval by therapist, but that could be remediated with therapy. The developer of NN disguishes between what she calls “true retrieval problems” and other processing problems which impact word retrieval as well as an inefficient system like my son has. To date, he has become much faster at doing the therapy tasks (each set to compentency) but we haven’t seen a transfer to speech. The therapist told me that it takes six sets of “fast naming” sheets before you see carry over. We are on number five. We have been doing this for 7 1/2 months. So, if this works, it will not have been fast. We have done the exercises 6-7 days a week for all these months.

We have seen a lot of other improvements with the program—his vestibular system is almost normal now, auditory localization is normal, small motor skills are dramatically improved ect. so even if we don’t get the word retrieval gains, I won’t be disappointed.

Just thought you might be interested in hearing from someone doing the program.

Beth