Why Children Can Read But Not Talk

Why do children read better than they talk? And in this video I'll tell you exactly why and also how to fix this. Stick to the end if you don't want to. Exactly know that the steps to get children get better at talking instead of reading. Okay, so the first thing we're going to talk about is understanding reading rules. And I'm going to talk about 1, 2 and 3 points altogether. Strap in and we'll go into this graph here. So without blowing your mind that these two graphs look the same. So this one is a little bit more colorful. So I'll stick to this one. How does this all work? What does this all mean, you might ask. So the first thing you need to understand if someone like me and you or your child, they read the word dog, let's just say dog. Very easy. If you've gone through any reading training before. This is cpc meaning consonant vowel word here. So you see, there are many paths to get from the print this word to the speech, right? Meaning I can say this out loud. So there are many paths. I can either go straight line this way, I can go this way into like this or like this. What do these lines mean? I'm going to tell you right away and why it makes perfect sense for a child to to only read and not talk. All right, let's talk about the orthographic analysis. Just means the child or you can identify this is a D, this is the O, this is G, right? And then once they can do that, they go on to the next level and they go into the graphene phoneme rule system, which means it's qualified name for jolly phonics. Right. So if D, I know it's a D, right? It's a O, as known as a O and G, I know it's a G. So I put them together at the response buffer. And that's just a fancy name for a place where we put everything together right? We get do like that. Somehow the, the spelling and the phonics look the same. This is a good example. And it turns into speech. I was writing here. Reading is rule based. We have a grapheme to phoneme conversion rule system. That's why we have jolly phonics. That's why children go there. That's why when we learn a particular language, we need to know what kind of rules are there which we go for alphabets, right? No, no wonder. No matter if you're learning Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, like Malaysian, English, Spanish, all these, we didn't know how the writing translates into speech sounds, which is the grapheme phoneme rule system. Okay, so English is a little bit more funny because it has three uses, a lot of words of different origins, like Latin, French, Greek, so on. I'm not a linguist, by the way, so don't burn me here. This way of going actually skips the semantic systems. So what is a semantic system? Semantic system. Semantic just means meaning, right? So if someone can read Japanese, and I'm not gonna, maybe I'll try O Ishi, I can read this, I can write it, and I don't need to know what it means. But if I look at it, it doesn't mean I understand any of it. I can just read it because I know the rules of the words. That's why it's funny. It's rule based. So children, especially those on the spectrum, they have something, some parents will say, oh, hyperlexia, I've never even heard of it at that time when the parent asked me about that. But something I understand about children on the spectrum or language delay people is that they love patterns. They're very into it. They love puzzles. They love these days. So it's funny to remember how it's like decoding something, right? So you might not be able to read this, right? But if I write it in English or Latin, the Romans would say, or you can read it, but you don't necessarily know any of it goes. It doesn't go through a semantic system. You don't have to know that in your dictionary, in your brain, you don't know it. So when this happens, it means that a child can actually read something without knowing the meaning. They don't need to register that in their brain and learn that word at all. Because for them, it's more like they're going through solving a puzzle, right? Decoding something that's fun to them. Okay? So when this happens, when you skip the whole semantic system, what's going to happen is that the word is not learned. All right? In Chinese, it's a lot harder to skip it because we have, when we're writing a word, there are two sides to it. And English is just one of the Latin based languages that have this kind of phonetic, I would say phonetic kind of language, right? And we have orthographic language like Chinese. So obviously, as you can, if you can, if you can't tell, I'm Chinese, so I know a little bit about this. But then when you have a phonetic language like Arabic, Japanese, Korean, English, Spanish, French, you can just go use this route, read something and not understand any of it. And you Would the child would miss out the meaning of the word, the understanding of it right here, miss all of this. They don't need to derive any of the orthographic meaning, the word meaning lexicons. Lexicon just means dictionary, right. They don't need to go through the semantic system to pull anything out. So. So therefore when they read something to them, it's just gibberish, okay. And it's just funny. So let's see what I wrote here. The next thing is semantic root versus the phonetic root. So we can look about and I'll go back to the Chinese rule later on. Okay? The adult aphasia therapy, something I learned back in my masters, is that if a person who had a stroke or a traumatic brain injury, when we want to teach them a word, they always had a word retrieval problem. What happens is that we realize there are two routes. To get someone to say a word out loud, to retrieve it out. Sometimes when a particular path is impaired, we try to use the other path, right? Let me give you an example. People who have aphasia, who are adults, when they don't remember the word, they tend to. They come over here, right? And then they go into the semantics and they say a bunch of stuff around the object. They're like, oh, this thing is like, I use it to call someone and use it to get around on maps. What is it? It's smartphone, right? This whole thing gets impaired, I would say. And this is a theory model, by the way. I'm not going to go into this because I don't necessarily treat adult patients. What I want to say is this is how it looks as an adult. As a child, these things might not even be developed yet. So what happens is that children, they will just skip visual analysis all the way to here, this thing, These are gone. This is gone. Acoustic analysis to phonemes and then here. So you only have. It's literally the same graphene to phoneme rule, right? So these, all these here are gone. So when they're developing, they haven't developed these at all. So when we look at how it should be developed, how a person who had it and lost some of the language before, as an adult, after, like a traumatic injury or a stroke, you will see what kind of systems are lacking. So therefore, when we're doing therapy for children, when we're looking at children who are reading too well for their own good and not talking as much as they should, we will know. Oh, crap. So I scribbled all over. So I need to get rid of this. We'll say, oh, crap. So actually, what we need to do is the semantics. We need to teach semantics. We need to do phonological lexicon, right? We need to get. Not necessarily this part, because this is still about written words, right? We need to get the spoken word to speech inside of the brain. We need to develop the semantic. Develop their vocabulary, right? Develop their phonological awareness towards the semantic stuff, and then help them bridge this gap between the lexicon to the phonemes. Okay, so it sounds crazy right now, so let me use something simpler to tell you if I can find it. That is about this one. So this is all Chinese. I get it. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna help you simplify this. It's literally the same model again. This one, this word here literally means sound. All right, Sound. This means the form, right? And this means meaning. Okay, so what happens when a child can read but not talk as well? They might not even know the meaning. Is that from the sound to the meaning, from the form to the meaning, there's no linkage or very weak linkage from form to the sound. There's a good linkage, so that's why they can read. Okay, so when we're treating or trying to teach a child, the best way possible is to learn more words so that they can use it in their speech, is to go from sound to this one, some sound to meaning. But the problem is we're lacking a form. So we can either use a written cue for them to make them understand when they're supposed to say something, a word or whatever, you can write out the word if they can read it as a written cue to help them build this link. Or it could be gestures. A gesture that is a form of the language. A gesture. So if I'm doing eat, let's do something harder because I always talk about the simpler word. So, for instance, sit, right? You can do this sit as a gesture, right? That's asl. Okay? So if that's the case, it sits, or you can write it. Or it could be a picture of a person sitting. So that's why people would use PECs and AAC, like iPads and stuff, to create an image of it so that you have a form to teach out of, so that you can use this to build this linkage between here and here. Because they can read, remember, from form to sound, that's reading, right? The form to meaning, Then it's an understanding of the word, right? So if they got this link good, but they don't have the sound to the meaning, Right. So what you got to do is to create the meaning for them. Meaning showing pictures, showing gestures, showing the written word. That's why people are therapists in general or teachers are recommending the use of AAC like iPad communication devices for children who can actually top. So this can only work if the therapist you have this understanding and to use this accordingly. All right. And if the child actually understands pictures writing better than gestures, because I think gestures are still very powerful because you don't always need that device around you to do the therapy. All right, I've scribbled all over again, so hopefully you get what I'm trying to say. Children who are. That's the why part. Okay. Children who are reading but not talking, they have impaired links. Not impaired, but they haven't developed these links. That's why. So let's go back. All right, so the reason for English preference, as I was saying, when you have a child who can understand, I'll use green here. Who can understand? Who can read. Sorry, who can read a word without understanding the meaning, then English is the most spoken language on the Internet. So if a child who is stuck with screens and listen to all the songs on nursery rhymes, they're all in English, what happens is that they start to develop a very good grapheme to phoneme rule system for English and therefore they're already on a head start for reading. And you see how many times they repeat if you watch the ABC songs A A for apple, A A or A for alligator and they spell it out one by one, just how good of this thing is developed. Right? So going back to the other point about like autistic traits and reading, right? Because a lot of, as I was saying before, parents are like, oh my God, my childhood's on the spectrum and read, but they can't really talk that well. The reason is because of this over developed rule system that we have in the middle here that a lot of times there's not enough generalization, a lack of a generalization to use other forms to read to understand a word or understand the spoken language. So that's why a lot of times when they see a word pop out, they read it or when they say it, they want to spell it. When they, a lot of parents are saying, oh, they actually can spell so much better than I thought. It's because of this over developed rule system that kind of not needed the semantic, whole semantic system and to. To build lexicons, dictionaries in the brain. The reason is as simple as that they cannot generalize it. Right? So then what happens is that because autistic children or people, I'm going to get killed here, when I say it, to use very textbook terms, is they have ritualistic behaviors, right? Reading becomes ritualistic, okay? So that's why we are seeing children on the spectrum reading better. Okay. And the relationship with gestalt language processing. Okay, I'm going to talk about this. I'm going to get a shtick about this as well. I think, and this is my own thoughts, that this is very similar. Is that the word or the phrase? So gestalt language processing just means children learn in phrases rather than words. That's the whole stick of it, is that the, the phrase, the whole thing goes through this semantic system and it gets remembered as a lexicon. The whole phrase, remember, I read as a term in the brain, and it goes through the semantics as semantic system, meaning where we store the meaning of a word as a phrase. Okay, so that is why. And I'll use this, I will use this, this overdrawn thingy over here, the adult version of the system, to tell you a bit about what I think. So children who are having a gestalt learning processing, whatever situation or that they are on the spectrum and they keep on reading really well, a lot of times what we see is that they don't use this, the semantics part that much, if you give. And a lot of times when we are doing therapy, therapists or teachers or parents, they like to use a phonological cue like a phonemic cue. Like, for instance, if I say wash your. And the phrase that the child remembers all the time is wash your hands or B is always be careful. Sorry for my writing. It's horrendous on using a mouse. And a lot of times when we want to cue, like wash something, it becomes wash your hands because the phonemic it will trigger the highest frequency meaning the word that is used or the phrase that used the most. So then when you give a phonological or phonemic cue, what happens? Like a sound cue, that means it will trigger wash your hands. And you can't cue anything else. All right, so what we need to do instead, or when you say be for. Because it'll become be careful, which is quite funny, what we need to do is to use semantics as a cue. So you can say what? You can just ask questions. What do you do, for instance, if you want to say wash shoes. Right. What do you do when shoes get dirty? Wash. Right. So you see, even I, by accident would do what like that, as A phonological cq. But then you need to add semantic cues such as rubbing your hands together or showing a picture or showing a writing or using questions to trigger this part to make them remember. And use the brain instead of using the first, the syllable or the first word wash of being. And it triggers the highest frequency thing. I'm laughing because we had a child from Singapore who's one of our clients. He actually had the exact same thing. He went from no words to words. Finally, we were very happy about that, don't get me wrong. But then when we got to getting him to say the words himself, the mother would prompt him with a sound cue. So he would say for spoon. But he said snake. So that. And then I told the mom, okay, we need to use semantic like gestural cubes, like this, like that. So when we did that, he said spoon. And some people will say, well, what if it's scoop? He says, I'd rather have a semantic error like this meaning, a very close meaning word error, than a whole different word. That's a, that's like snake, right? So at least it's semantically similar. At least that's the function of, of the thingy. All right, so let's keep on going. What did I write here? So in Chinese wisdom, there's something called listen, speak, read and write. So it's basically in Cantonese, right? So there's some Chinese wisdom towards it. The first, even in speech therapy, we always talk about comprehension, receptive language, right? And then we talk about speak, which is expressive language, right? And then read is the receptive version of written language, right? And then we learn to write. So if someone skips ahead to read rather than to speak, then this would be called a disorder. But what people don't understand, and I've said this many times, a lot, parents, is that we need to use what is strong, which is reading, to treat what is weak, which is speaking. So it goes into exactly what I want to talk about teaching, talking. So to teach a child to talk, we need to use strong for the weak. We had a, another client from Australia. The child would read quite well, the whole storybook, basically. But when it comes to talking in a sentence, she would jumble up all the sentence structures. So we need to create a why for the talking. Usually that's play. So I'm not going to go into full detail about play based speech therapy. So you can. There's loads of videos on our channel. Just search play, right? Create the why. And then you want him with her in this cl. In this case, I want her to say, to speak whilst. Whilst playing and you. And then any therapy. The cues and the prompts are the most valuable things you can do for a child. So these cues and prompts, we will have to stick with this semantics, right? Doesn't matter if we're teaching whatever word you will. You should use. Sorry, where was I? Yeah. So you should use gestures to help the child understand which word goes where, or to teach a new word or pictures or words. And to make things easier, you can put subtitles under the pictures to make things easier, you can put subtitles as a piece of paper whilst you're doing the gesture. Right. So that. To go back to this one, right, is that you're helping your child to build these bridges, right, from the form to the meaning. Right? The form. They already know how to read. How to read. They already know how to read. So you're using that to create the meaning within. Put a subtitle underneath the picture. And whilst you're doing the play, right, once you get that, you can get rid of the subtitles and only use the gestures, which is all about the meaning. Sorry, I should circle the English where it's all about the English to prompt the speech sound out. Right. So when we're working with a lot of parents, it looks like the mom is miming out the sentence while the child tries to understand all the gestures and turn it into speech sounds. Now, this is very good because why it's basically only doing this link from meaning to sound. And we're getting rid of this one, which is the very strong thing. But we want to have this bridge like a relay, if you can look at it. If you look at it, this acts as a relay, right? It goes. It bridges it over. So if you have the form, you use a relay to go between the sound and the meaning. All right, so that is how you teach a child to speak when especially they can read better. You need to have a very strong why, which is usually play. After that, you use what the child is good at, which is usually reading, as the cues and the prompts, and you add it to new things like gestures and pictures so that you're building the building gestures and pictures as cues. And then you get rid of the words only using gesture and pictures so that you build the bridge between the meaning and the sound. All right, so it sounds complicated or it sounds simple. I don't know which one it is. But this is a very long version of why children can read but not talk as well as they read okay, so that's all for this video. If you want to learn more about this and get us to help you, just go to agents of Speech.com course. We have free courses there as more in depth than what this video is. And if you want to and you want to learn more or you're on a roll, go on to the next video right here.