Melanie Weber
speaker
894 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard 23 Oct
Melanie Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
We could start changing the script from a very short word to say, let's go to school, let's go to the mall, let's go to the store.
And we're showing them how language is flexible.
And we want to break apart these whole chunks that they have into lots of smaller pieces so that we can mix and match those pieces.
And so if you imagine language development like blocks in a tower,
The traditional, I hate saying the word traditional, but what we have learned about language development from a traditional sense, what I was taught in grad school about language development is that kids have all these blocks.
They learn blocks one at a time, one word at a time.
And then once they have a bunch of blocks, they start building these towers and then they get more complex as they go.
But children who are Gestalt processors who use echolalia or scripting to communicate are often given their blocks already constructed in a tower.
And so what we have to do is help them break that tower apart so that they can rebuild it to see all the infinite combinations of what they could do with these words.
So the important takeaway from this is that echolalia is a part of language development.
That's not always a sign of a delay.
You have kids use echolalia that will then go on and communicate without needing any help from us.
And it makes me think a lot of times about the people that were like, oh, my uncle didn't speak till he was four.
And then he just started talking all the time.
Well, we will never know.
If he just was not talking and then he was talking in full sentences, but maybe he was going through these stages of analytic language development and they didn't quite realize that right.
But if we go back to Andy I can say Andy at 15 years old did have a delay, he was a gestalt processor he used echolalia to communicate.
But there was a delay, because we were using that echolalia primarily to communicate that's like the beginning stages right so.
What I learned was how to take him through these stages by helping him shorten them and giving him phrases that maybe matched more closely.
And I stopped trying to think about what he was going to say and started really listening.
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