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
What do I do with echolalia?
And that led me to a training by Marge Blanc on Gestalt language development.
And if you've never heard that term before, the root word gestalt means whole or chunk.
So Marge Blanc talks in her presentation about gestalt language development being a very natural and real type of language development that a lot of autistic kids go through.
So just like babies imitate before they speak, autistic children will often imitate as well, but they are imitating whole words or chunks or gestalts of language before they start building and breaking down their language into smaller pieces.
So in this training, everything she said just made so much sense.
It gave a clear framework of how you move through this developmental stage.
And some kids move through this stage all on their own.
They don't need us to go through it, just like you have kids learn language without needing help from a speech therapist.
But there are some kids who do need support.
And so for what we call an analytic language learner, someone who learns language one word at a time, you have that development of a word, a phrase, and then a short sentence, like
Juice, more juice, I want more juice.
For kids who have this gestalt language development, where they learn words in these chunks based on meaning, they are storing phrases as one meaning at first, that scripted phrase.
So vampire's Halloween nightmare before Christmas is one phrase that is communicating I'm anxious.
And what we can do to help them move through it is first give them a phrase that's easier for us to break into parts.
Like, you know, I'm nervous.
And then we help them start to mix and match the language.
I'm upset, I'm happy, I'm angry, whatever that may be.
A really good example would be a kid who uses like, let's go to the park anytime they want to go outside.
They may not be always asking to go to the park, but they want to go somewhere.
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