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Language Therapy as a Game
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===Before Your Child Can Speak=== What does it take to learn a language? Memorizing a ton of vocabulary and grammar rules, for sure. But is that enough? Before we can use any language, we need something much more basic. A skill we learned so early in life that we don’t remember learning it. It has to do with holding multiple objects in your mind’s eye and rearranging them at will. Think of two phrases: “cat on a mat” and “mat on a cat.” Same vocabulary, same grammar. And yet, you and I can easily tell the difference, but a low-functioning autistic individual cannot. What’s going on? Let’s get a hold of modern brain-imaging equipment and look “under the hood.” Nerve cells located in the back of the brain encode the meaning of the words “cat” and “mat,” as well as that of the spatial preposition “on.” The front of the brain activates each group of cells, determines their grammatical roles, and applies the preposition. To understand the entire phrase, the brain must activate the meaning of all three words and their grammatical attributes within milliseconds of one another. Only then does the difference between the two phrases become apparent. The precise timing of the activation process is only possible when high-speed connections exist between the front and the back of the brain. You already know from [http://languagedelay.org/index.php/Chapter_1 Chapter 1] that these connections must form before the age of five in both typical and autistic children. However, a typical child needs only to be exposed to language, as it usually happens in the course of our daily lives, while your child needs extra motivation and structure. Helping your child build these connections is the focus of the games and exercises we introduce in this chapter.
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