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Language Therapy as a Game
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===Not Any Old Language Therapy=== What would you do if you wanted to become an athlete? Would you spend your time practicing and conditioning your body? Or looking for a perfect pair of athletic shoes? The answer seems obvious. Shoes are a must, but they’re not a factor, until your skill and your physique rise to a competitive level. Now that you understand a little about how the brain processes language, you see that vocabulary training is not a factor in your child’s mastery of combinatorial language. Not until your child learns to combine objects into new and unfamiliar images in his mind’s eye. Let’s call this skill [https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.26613/esic.4.2.186/html?lang=en voluntary imagination]. It is voluntary imagination, rather than memorization, that relies on high-speed connections between the front and the back of the brain. It is, therefore, the specific component of combinatorial language we must acquire in early childhood. Let’s go back to our example of “cat on the mat.” What happens in your mind’s eye when you read these words? You place the image of “cat” on top of the image of “mat.” If I said “big black cat on a tiny wet mat,” you would immediately adjust the mental picture to reflect the additional details. If I now said, “big black mat on a wet cat—” no problem! Your brain instantly disassembles and reassembles the images into a new picture, even though you have never encountered such a thing in your life. Congratulations! Your voluntary imagination is in perfect working order, and that’s what we want for your child. Voluntary imagination allows a child to visualize something on demand in the same way as flexing your muscles at will allows you to command body movements. We need voluntary imagination to match a verbal description to an object: “Show me a big red ball.” To predict the outcome of an imaginary event: “The frog ate the dog. Who is alive?” Or to follow the curious words of a fairy tale, Here, for example, is The Adventures of Pinocchio: “…the Shark took a deep breath and, as he breathed, he drank in the Marionette as easily as he would have sucked an egg. Then he swallowed him so fast that Pinocchio, falling down into the body of the fish, lay stunned for a half hour...” The head-spinning drama of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale is only as good as our mind’s ability to produce an image of a wooden boy trapped inside the belly of a shark. It’s important to understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary imagination. One is a purposeful activity fully under our control. The other arises spontaneously, like a dream or a passing thought. Children often rely on involuntary imagination when doodling or coloring. Both types of imagination contribute to our creativity and problem-solving, but only voluntary imagination connects the front and the back of the brain. Involuntary imagination resides entirely in the back of the brain. Voluntary imagination, on the other hand, depends on both the front and back of the brain, as well as the front-to-back connections. My team and I reasoned that voluntary imagination exercises, like the ones I just described, could help autistic children learn combinatorial language—because they prompted the brain to use front-to-back connections. With daily practice, these connections would grow stronger, eliminating the main obstacle to combinatorial language. To test our idea, we wrote a software application with voluntary imagination exercises disguised as games. We called it [http://imagiration.com/autism/ Mental Imagery Therapy for Autism] or MITA. The games automatically adjust to each child’s ability, increasing in difficulty as the child gains skill. And none of the games repeat—ever! So, there’s no chance for a child to simply memorize the correct answer. Every minute is spent “flexing” the mind’s eye. We made MITA available to parents free of charge on the condition that they complete an evaluation every three months to let us know how their child is doing. In 2015, we launched a three-year study of the language therapy embodied in the app. 6,454 children between the ages of two and twelve completed our study. It became the largest and the longest study of language intervention in autistic children. At the end of the three-year period, the children who regularly completed MITA exercises scored 120 percent higher on the language test than the children with matching initial scores who did not <ref> Vyshedskiy, A.; Khokhlovich, E.; Dunn, R.; Faisman, A.; Elgart, J.; Lokshina, L.; Gankin, Y.; Ostrovsky, S.; deTorres, L.; Edelson, S.M.; et al. Novel Prefrontal Synthesis Intervention Improves Language in Children with Autism. Healthcare 2020, 8, 566. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8040566 </ref>. The study helped us formulate a simple winning strategy for acquiring language: Focus all your efforts on building voluntary imagination. Thousands of children who completed our study proved our approach to be more effective. That’s why I don’t want you to worry about your child’s vocabulary. If you employ a language therapist, find out what happens during sessions. Memorizing lots of words does nothing to train voluntary imagination. The most important thing is to connect the words. Be prepared to guide the therapist—or become one yourself.
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