Writing Goals for Gestalt Language Processors

Marisha Mets (00:00)

So hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. We have Katya Piscitelli with us today and she is going to help break down how we can start navigating goals for our Gestalt language processors. And before we do that, just a really quick intro to Katya. She works in Sacramento, California. She has an incredible

private practice called total spectrum speech. And she specializes in working with autistic clients and she uses the natural language acquisition framework. She's also presented in several different locations and has just become a really well, sought after resource for speech language pathologists. So I'm excited to have her here today. So welcome Katya.

Thanks, thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat. Yeah, me too. And so I gave a little bit of an intro, but I feel like it doesn't do you any justice. So I'm curious to hear just a little bit about your story. So how did you end up learning so much about natural language acquisition and just kind of a little bit of how you got to where you are? Yeah, I mean, I'm learning right along with you all, but

In 2020, I stumbled upon it. I was not taught about Gestalt language or natural language acquisition in school as most of us weren't. But right out of my ACF in 2020, I found it. Meaningful Speech started posting on Instagram and I happened to find her account in the very early days and

I always knew I wanted to support autistic students, but I felt like I was just spinning my wheels, not really getting anywhere. And it never felt quite intuitive the way I was taught. It always felt a bit icky and I never really knew why. in finding learning about Gushelt language processors and NLA and just child led therapy in general, it was...

everything that I had been missing. So I really dove into it and started making it my specialty. in, gosh, I think 2022, I started seeing private clients and focused only on supporting Gestalt processors. So I've been supporting solely GLPs for about three years now.

And yeah, I've really dove in and learned as much as I could, but yeah, definitely still learning every day and every client is so different as we all know. Yeah, what a great story. Thank you for sharing that. so I get a lot of questions about, okay, so how do I write goals for this or this or this? And I think natural language acquisition and all of that brings up even more of those questions.

And it's obviously a really tiny part of the puzzle. And we want to make sure that we're doing like a high quality assessment before we write those goals and that we're implementing evidence -backed strategies and all of that. And we don't have the time to dive into all of that to fully do the topic justice. So I'm curious if you have any favorite resources to help SLPs who are just wanting to learn more about the basics.

Yeah, when I got started learning about Gestalt, the only resources that we really had were Marge Blanc's book, Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum, which is still the most amazing resource because it's all of this 15 years of longitudinal studies on Gestalt processors in one book and lots of amazing case studies. But we really just had that and Marge Blanc's courses on

Northern Speech Services, but now we have so many resources. So whether you're trying to invest in a course or just get some free information, there's a ton out there. And I have a lot of it pinned in my feed on Instagram under free resources, but my favorite

Courses are still Marge Blanc's courses as well as the Meaningful Speech course. And then there's a group called Natural Communication and they have a free introductory course to the natural language acquisition stages. They have some paid shorter courses as well. And then my favorite resource for parents and teachers and speech therapists is

CommunicationDevelopmentCenter .com, which is Marge's website. It goes really in depth into each of the natural language acquisition stages, has examples of therapy, lots of research and just resources linked there, so all for free. So it's a great, great place to start. That's awesome. So many resources. I was...

Your Instagram account has so many resources, like you said. So in the show notes, I'll add a link to your profile and some of my favorite posts, if that's okay. And then I'll also include some of the resources that you mentioned, including Marge Blanc's book, the meaningful speech course, and then some of Marge Blanc's courses as well, and Marge's website. So lots and lots of resources to help us get started.

And then, natural language acquisition and all of that is still potentially, because you graduated in 2020 and you didn't learn about it in grad school. So the vast majority of SLPs probably didn't have that in their training. And those of us who know about it have learned about it kind of after the fact. But can you give us like a brief description of what it is and kind of

just to make sure we're on the same starting point. Yeah. So Gestalt language processors, there's two ways to process language, analytic and Gestalt. Hopefully we, if you're looking for goals that align with these kids, hopefully you're at least understanding that difference a bit, but natural language acquisition or the stages that these kids naturally move through to go from.

delayed echolalia all the way to self -generated grammar. So there's four main stages with two extra stages, which is basically just more and more complex grammar in those two extra stages. But yeah, March Blanc noticed that most autistic kids that she was supporting with language were moving through these stages naturally, or this same sort of sequence naturally. They were going from delayed echolalia, stage one to

mitigating or mixing and matching these chunks of language in stage two. Then they started piecing out single words in stage three and then in stage four putting those single words together like all kids hopefully do to create grammar. So she just noticed that happening and put a name to it. And natural language acquisition is that name to describe that process that happens. So we can do therapy and goals that are supportive of moving kids.

through that process. Yeah. And I think maybe this is obvious, but can we chat a little bit about, so, because I think our first step is determining what kind of language processors our students are. But is there, I guess, like from your perspective, could it do harm or is it like potentially not best practice if we're writing goals for,

like traditional goals when the student might benefit from more of the natural language approach. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely see quite a few kids that have obviously had a more analytic style approach. So maybe they would have done better with learning gestalts or these larger chunks of language, but they were really

taught and drilled single words because we assumed that they were learning the way many kids do, which is at the single word level to begin. And then they get kind of stuck in that place. So yeah, it can definitely slow progress or cause kids to get a bit stuck. Some kids will do fine with whatever input you give them, but typically kids who are really needing some language support, it's going to be much more supportive if we're

teaching them in the way that they are truly processing. Yeah, that makes sense. So then what are some important considerations when we are writing goals for those students? Yeah. So you really have to understand the stages and to really get comfortable writing these goals.

In terms of generally supporting Gestalt processors, I'm always looking to have the same sort of criteria in goals. Like it should be spontaneous and self -generated, not prompted. So typically I start the goal with child will spontaneously and

without prompting produce whatever the goal is because that's one of the biggest things we're looking for when supporting push -dot processors and movement through the stages is that the language they're producing is spontaneous. It's not something that we're prompting with a question or giving a direct model. And what else? What other criteria do I look for?

I think that's the biggest thing. Yeah. And then we can talk about what those goals look like, but I'll let you lead that. Yeah, that would be great. the first thing is that when we're writing these goals, we're thinking about writing them for what the student will spontaneously produce without prompting. then your next...

I assume the next step then would be to look at kind of what stage they're in and write goals according to that. Yeah.

Yeah, so generally our assessment is really looking at the language sample and figuring out which stage they're falling into most of the time. Because typically these kids are a bit all over the place and they might be 80 % in stage one, but a little bit in stage two and a tiny bit in stage three. And that's super typical, but we want to write goals and support them in the place they are the most and then try to move them to.

the next closest stage. Yeah. then, so, cause let's say that, cause when you're doing the assessment, you are looking at the utterances and you kind of like classify the utterances. let's say they're at like 20 % stage one, 60 % stage two, and then what? 20 % stage three.

So would you write some goals? Would you write most of your goals in stage? Cause they're pretty much doing stage two already. So your goals would probably be more stage three, right? And I know it's so hard to say with like this is you would be looking at the whole child and not just like those three pieces of data. But is that how you would think about it?

Yeah, so you said that there are 80 % stage one, 20 % stage two, 20 % stage three. 20 % of utterances are like at stage one. Okay, got it. 60 % stage two. So it adds up to 100, but. Okay, I flopped those. Yeah. So yes, when we're looking at goals, we're typically looking for them to be 50 % in the

earlier stage before we move to the next. So if they're in 60 % stage two, they've hit that 50 % criteria of stage two, so they're likely ready to start moving to stage three. that shows in the example you gave because they're in stage three 20 % of the time. typically what we hope to see is once a child is at 50 % stage two, give or take, they're going to start naturally moving to.

stage three. When it comes to moving to the next stage in any of the stages, it's not our choice to move them there. We really have to follow them there once they go there naturally. Yeah, so if a child was meeting that criteria, it looks like they would probably be ready for stage three. But I'm often kind of, I'm often writing goals for a couple stages at once. Sometimes they are,

showing readiness for the next stage and moving there, but there's still some things we need to fill in in the previous stage. For example, if they're in stage one, 70 % of the time in stage three, 30 % of the time, they're showing that they're ready, or sorry, stage two. If they're in stage one, most of the time in stage two, 30 % of the time, they're showing readiness that they can move to stage two and start mitigating.

So we can help them there. We can write a goal that they're gonna get to 50 % stage two and help them to mitigate more. But then we also wanna make sure that they're hitting all the criteria in stage one. And the things we're looking for in stage one are really amount and variety of gestalts. The amount is really dependent on the child, how many gestalts we're really looking for. So there's no set number, but we want them to have quite a few.

and we want them to have variety and that is often the biggest piece I'm looking at. So if a kid's moving to stage two, I might follow them there and write goals there, but also maybe they're missing some variety in stage one and I'm gonna give them gestalts for that as well. So maybe they are producing lots of mitigations, they're ready for stage two, but they're not producing protests and protesting gestalts. I might also be filling those in.

giving them more protesting gestalts as I'm also helping them to mix and match. So sometimes it's a little, it's a bit in both stages, wherever stages they're in and you're kind of making sure they're filling in the missing pieces before fully moving on. Yeah. Yeah, that does make sense. like if we, with this hypothetical kiddo that we've been talking about, so if like, let's go with the kiddo who's 70,

percent stage one and 30 % stage two, because I think that's easier to wrap our heads around than the numbers I gave. So we could write a goal where the child will spontaneously without producing or without prompting produce. And I guess this would be given a language sample, da -da -da -da. They'll produce 50 % of stage two utterances. Is that something that would like?

potentially be a goal? Yeah. then you said, actually, did you have something to add? No, go ahead. OK. But we're still working on the stage one because even if they're at 70%, there's still room for growth there. And we get to use our clinical judgment to decide which areas the student would benefit from. And you had given an example of protesting castles.

we could write a goal that the student will spontaneously without prompting produce like whatever type of stouts that we want them to produce. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe five new protesting phrases in that example. So when it comes to goals in each stage and stage one are my goals are usually focused on amount or variety of gestalt. So it might just be if they're, if they're picking up

our models rather slowly, I might just make a goal for amounts like this child's gonna produce 10 new Gestalt and it can be any Gestalt that they might pick up on and that's our overall goal because even 10 new phrases would be awesome. Or I look at communicative functions or variety. So maybe I'm just hoping to increase general variety. So child will produce more variety of

utterances to include communicative functions like commenting, protesting, suggesting, whatever, whatever communicative functions you think are maybe lacking. Or I might just focus on one specific communicative function that's missing, but that's usually what stage one looks like is either more gestalts or specific kind of gestalts that they might be missing. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then, so I feel like we've got some good ideas just for the general stages. And then we talked a little bit about stage two. Is there, could we go over just like some quick things that we might, like more specific goals that we might look at for stage two and three and maybe four? Yeah. Okay, cool. So.

Like I said, our overarching goal on stage one is more Gestalt and greater variety. And the idea is once they have that, once they have a lot of Gestalt and a big variety of Gestalt, they're gonna naturally move to stage two. And then our overall goal is that they're just going to mitigate, they're gonna mix and match these Gestalt more, they're gonna break them down. So generally stage two goals just look like a percentage that they'll be in stage two. if they're,

only in stage two, 10 % of the time, maybe I'm gonna try to move them to using stage three 30 % of the time. And that 50 % threshold is kind of the, where we're trying to get them because we assume once they're there, they're gonna naturally start to move to stage three. Not every kid is gonna start moving to stage three the second they're in 50 % stage two, but that is the overarching goal of stage two. So it just kind of generally.

looks like that, just a greater amount of mixing and matching. And then once you have that, they'll naturally move to stage three and stage three looks very different. It looks like pulling out single words and then making two and three word combinations. So in stage three, we're looking for three different types of words, nouns, descriptive words, and locative words.

And then we're looking for two or three word combos, including those, all of those. So your goals might just be around percentage again, like the child's going to be in stage three, 50 % of the time. Or you could look at some of those words or word combos specifically, like maybe child will produce noun plus noun combinations.

or they'll produce noun plus descriptor combinations, or they'll produce more isolated descriptor words. We really start with the isolated words and then move into the word combinations. So you could look at any piece of those noun locative words or descriptive words that they might not be using as often as the other pieces and really try to focus on those. Yeah. And then once they are...

doing that readily, they're there about 50 % of the time and they're using all of those different combinations, noun plus noun, noun plus descriptor and noun plus locative word. And they're moving into three word combinations. Then they're gonna start, hopefully, naturally moving to stage four and adding in verbs. And then our goals start to look more like typical grammar goals. So whatever.

grammar piece they're missing, starting with really basic grammar. So we're starting with, just as we would with any toddler, kind of toddler -like, really basic level grammar, three word combinations, maybe noun plus verb. And then from there, it gets more and more complex. ING verbs, past tense, and so on, until they're producing clauses and...

really complex grammar. So stage four goals look very different depending on where they are in that grammar acquisition.

journey, but yeah. That sounds great. That's a really helpful overview. think, cause I took some courses when I started learning about this too. And I think this will be just, I don't know. I wanted like a quick easy way to kind of wrap my head around, okay, what would this actually look like? So I think this will be really, really helpful in just like,

Okay, give me a quick, quick overview and then I'll dive into more detail. But I feel like this is a really nice framework and just starting to think about what it could look like. So thank you for breaking this down so nicely. Yeah, I'm glad. I think it's really helpful to understand kind of how each stage flows into the other to really frame our goals. If we know that once we hit the certain criteria and in each stage, it'll naturally

the child will naturally move to the next. It can help us understand why we're even writing that goal. So yeah, I hope it was helpful. Yeah. Yeah. And in the show notes, I'll have like a little recap of this as well so that if you are listening, hopefully you'll have like a good, easy reference to look back at too. And yeah, is there anything else that you wanted to share while we're chatting?

no, I'll just kind of refer again to communication development center. If you're wanting more info on the stages and supporting each one and they have, when we're supporting stage four, there's some grammar sheets that we follow that are created by Laura Lee. They were norms for analytic processors. So not really with Gestalt in mind, but we can use them to support.

the grammar development once you're in stage four. So if you're wanting those charts, you might hear them mentioned on Instagram or wherever the DSS and the DST, those are linked at that website as well for free. So yeah, it's a good place to go if you're wanting more resources, more info about grammar or any of the, any related info. Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah.

And then like I said, I'll link to your Instagram and everything in the show notes so people can follow you and see all of your awesome content. And yeah, thank you for being so generous with your time. This was great. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun.