Narrative Skills

Children who have difficulties with word order or sentence structure can often be difficult to understand or easily misunderstood as the words in the sentence are jumbled up or don’t flow. Rules of word order and sentence structure are referred to as syntax.

Difficulties with syntax can impact a child’s expressive language skills and can cause:

• Poor narrative skills.
• Incorrect word order causing misinterpretation.
• Omission of words in sentences.
• Limited number of complex sentences.
• May speak in short simple sentences.
• May talk in single words.
• Difficulties with literacy skills.

Students with word finding difficulties have difficulties soring and/or retrieving words  from their semantic (vocabulary) system. Word finding difficulties may be frustrating and distressing for students and can impact on day-to-day communication, self-esteem, social skills and academic success

Signs of Word Finding Difficulties

• Overuse of fillers during speech (e.g. “um”)
• Repetitions in speech (e.g. “I went, I went, I went to the shop”)
• Circumlocutions (talking around the word, e.g. [soap] “you wash with it”)
• Use of vague/non-specific words (e.g. “stuff”, “thing”)
• Substitutions for words in the same/similar category (e.g. [hammer] “tool”)
• Delays/hesitations in responding (due to increased time required to find the word)

YES@ Areté Learning Trust can offer advice and support semantic development and word retrieval.