What is Gestalt Language Processing?

Did you know that some people are gestalt language processors? As a pediatric speech language pathologist, I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know this until very recently. Along with learning more about ableism in the field of speech therapy and neurodiversity-affirming practices, I’ve also been learning that I’ve been getting delayed echolalia, when a child echoes chunks of language they previously heard, completely wrong. Echolalia is a word that means echoed language, or language copied from others. Did you know that echoing language in full sentences before developing “first words” is a completely developmental way to process language and that there’s also a way to support it to develop, naturally?

Traditional language processing that is represented in all of the “typical” speech and language milestone charts from places like the CDC, pediatricians, and many speech therapists including myself, is reflective of analytic language processing, which is only one way to process language.

Analytic language processors first learn to babble, then learn single words around one year of age, and progress toward putting two and three words together over time. Previously, if a child wasn’t developing language in this way, I considered this to be “atypical.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong! Thanks to social media and the @meaningfulspeech Instagram account and website, I started to become aware of gestalt language processing, which involves learning language by “scripting” or echoing longer chunks of language from other people, TV, movies or other media. This type of language development is present in many autistic people and is also present in non-autistic people as well.

One example is a young child who says “To infinity and beyond!” copied from the movie Toy Story before they say first words like “more” or “cookie.” I’m sorry to say that I was taught to redirect a phrase like this, by showing my confusion at the comment and then redirecting the child to something “functional” or “on topic” like asking for the toy train that I was holding by saying “more” or “train.” I look back on my practice and I regret not knowing about gestalt language processing, and all of the things learners were trying to communicate to me using echoed phrases like this. I now realize that I missed out on so much connection and my redirection of echoed phrases like this was dismissive and invalidating to the child at best.

So what is gestalt language processing and what are some therapeutic techniques to support it? Marge Blanc is a speech language pathologist that has written multiple articles and an easy-to-read and insightful book on this called Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum (NLA). This information has been one of the biggest missing pieces in my practice and my work with children who develop language by repeating chunks of language they have heard previously. I cannot be more thankful to have stumbled upon Meaningful Speech’s training that introduced me to NLA and Marge Blanc’s work.

Here are the beginning stages of gestalt language processing:

Stage 1: Echolalia - Strings of language that are repeated from others, including communication partners, songs, or media. Ex: Let’s get out of here! Want some more?

Stage 2: Mitigated Echolalia - The strings of language from Stage 1 are now able to be mixed and matched with other chunks of language. Ex: Let’s get some more! Want out of here!

Stage 3: Isolation of Single Words - Words are now isolated into single words and can be recombined to generate two-word phrases. Ex: Get more! Want out!

Stage 4: Self-Generated Grammar - This is when a child starts formulating original sentences, starting out simple and then increasing in complexity. Ex: I get. I wanna get some more.

Reference: Marge Blanc

As you can see, this is more like a top-down approach to learning language versus bottom up, where a child is using longer phrases first, and then those are broken down and mixed and matched, and then they begin to use single words and combine them into sentences at Stage 3.

Supporting gestalt language learners in the natural development of language requires not treating them as if they are analytic language learners and expecting them to learn single words first to then put two words together. We must acknowledge and recognize the longer chunks of language that they use at first, like the “To infinity and beyond!” phrase, and be curious about where that chunk of language came from, what the child may have been feeling when they heard that phrase, and what they may be trying to communicate with it. Gestalt language learners often learn a phrase during a time of high emotion, whether that be a favorite scene in a movie, or during an important experience, and their use of the phrase at a later time may seem out of context to us, but to the child there is meaning there. We usually can’t take the gestalts literally. We must start to get curious to see what the gestalt could mean to the child and what they could be communicating.

If a child is in Stage 1, after learning what some of the child’s gestalts are and what they may meant to the child, we must model longer phrases that the child could easily break down and mix and match later. This is different from an analytic approach, where I would first model the word “train” for a child to ask for a train. A gestalt language approach would be to model “Let’s get the train!” with an excited intonation.

If you want more information, I would highly recommend taking Meaningful Speech’s online course and checking out Marge Blanc’s book and articles. There is so much more for me to learn about this and I’m glad this information has become more readily available recently to parents and professionals alike.

Do you think your child could be a gestalt language processor? Do you need guidance on how to best support their language development? Contact me for a free consultation.