‘Gestalt Language Processing’ and Intensive Interaction?

For my Blog this week I am going carefully to edge into some conceptually unknown territory. The reason for this is that over the past 5 months, I have heard a term used (mainly by speech and language therapists) that had previously been unfamiliar to me. This term is ‘Gestalt Language Processing’ – I have now heard it used by 5 different people on 5 different Intensive Interaction related occasions.

So, as an acknowledged novice learner in this area, I thought that I better do a bit of research to at least start to inform myself about ‘Gestalt Language Processing’(GLP) – this being particularly necessary as the people who used the term were all expressing opinions about it being sympathetic to, or compatible with the philosophy and practices of Intensive Interaction. So, what follows here is not an expert view on GLP, but an initial attempt at personally rationalising where I should conceptually sit in any future discussion on the subject i.e. from a slightly more informed perspective.

Now I do know a bit (at a fairly superficial level) about Gestalt psychology – this being an initially German school of psychology that focused on how humans perceive and come to understand objects, forms or configurations as whole entities rather than a collection of their component parts. Such a psychological position sees the mind as organizing its sensory inputs directly into meaningful wholes, rather than in relation to aspects of its make-up. Indeed, from the Gestalt position, any whole unit cannot be fully described by reference to the summation of its parts i.e. the whole is more than just the sum of its parts – which all seems fair enough to me (on the whole).

So, I am asking myself what, in more detail, is this thing called ‘Gestalt Language Processing’? And why should I, as someone who is interested in communicative inclusion and development through Intensive Interaction, be bothered with it all?

Well, having looked into it a bit, it seems that GLP is a description of language acquisition and development that seems to begin with the production by a person (usually a child) of multi-word “gestalt forms” – these multi-word units of language utterance perhaps previously being described (wrongly) as meaningless due to them being ‘scripted’ or ‘echolalic’ in form. Indeed, from a GLP viewpoint, the often-repeated use of such multi-word ‘gestalt’ utterances are not meaningless, but have communicative significance, and can be utilised as a basis for further language development.   

According to the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Association, Gestalt language acquisition has identifiable stages that move on from multi-word gestalt utterances to the production of creative and spontaneous language use. In the middle stages the Gestalt Language Processing child, through active engagement in accumulative communicative actions, comes to understand more about the internal word structure and syntactic rules. This GLP model contrasts with an ‘Analytic language acquisition’, which starts at the single word level and then subsequently builds to phrases and eventually sentences (Although personally, I think that this will be a spectrum, potentially with many language learners sitting somewhere between the two polar Gestalt or analytic descriptions, depending on the context of the language use).

According to my (okay, online) research, it was Dr Barry Prizant who originally published these GLP stages. Depending on the source, there are claimed to be between 3 and 6 discernible stages of gestalt language development; with autistic children seemingly more likely to fit within this language development model.

So now, this is where we, as Intensive Interaction practitioners and advocates should take notice. Our natural social inclusion sensibilities would say that ‘echolalia’, ‘delayed echolalia’ or ‘scripting’ is a form of communication, and therefore we should respond positively to it in some form. Also, that we as Intensive Interaction practitioners and advocates prioritise a social inclusion process model for those we work with and care for who have social communication differences or difficulties, either as an end in itself, or as a means of communicative developmental support.  Indeed, for those we support, we would hope that through giving socially inclusive and meaningful responses to any generated utterances, including scripted or repetitive/echolalic language, this will eventually build towards more self-generated and contextual language use.

In terms of how to support the language development of Gestalt Language Processors, across a number of ‘Therapy’ websites, and without this being an exhaustive list, these include:

• Let the child lead i.e. give the child the power to define the form and pacing of the communicative exchange.
• Observe, wait, and listen i.e. hold back and look for potential communication moments.
• Respond! Smile, nod, or repeat the language back to the child to acknowledge a communication attempt.
• Do NOT ignore echolalia i.e. embrace it and go with the communicative flow.
• Eliminate questions i.e. don’t interrupt the communicative flow.
• Give more scripts! i.e. extend the language used within the communicative flow and context.

So, without claiming to be an overnight expert in all things GLP, I feel that I can see where the philosophical and practical overlaps are with Intensive Interaction – maybe it is just another form of social and communicative scaffolding that more naturalistically nurtures communicative development.

But I would love to hear more about this issue from those who have better insights on this than me.