Gestalt Language Processing Stages: Complete Guide for SLP’s

Marisha Mets (00:02.414)

Hello there and welcome to the SLP Now podcast. I'm really looking forward to continuing our series on Gestalt Language Processing. And today we have a very, very special guest. have Marge Blanc with us. She is the author of Natural Language Acquisition on the Autism Spectrum.

It is a fabulous book and resource for SLPs who are wanting to implement this. And I'm just really grateful that Marge was so generous to share her time with us today. So I mean, Marge has such an amazing story. And so Marge, do you mind just sharing a little tidbit of your story and how, like, what led you to write that book and

just a little bit of your journey and then the rest of the time we'll spend on diving into the stages of natural language acquisition so we can start wrapping our head around that. And then we also have a special surprise at the end on just some different resources in case you're wanting to learn even more. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Marisha. This is a wonderful series and I've enjoyed.

listening to the other people who are part of this and each person seems to come to this journey in a bit different way. But I think the commonality is like, it's so real and natural and authentic and matters so much to the kids, the clients, know, older individuals in front of us that we all just find that

you know, almost immediate buy-in. And that was the same for me, although NLA per se hadn't been quote invented yet, but all of the preliminary research had been done. And so I know that you mentioned this earlier, that Anne Peters work that came together in 1983 put together the research from so many individuals who really were the

Marisha Mets (02:18.626)

beginnings of our entire profession. I mean, we didn't have ALPs as such, you know, designated until Ann Peters put some words on the kind of language development processes that kids go through. You know, before that, you know, people thought, well, it's just, you know, normal. It's just the way it is. And so she really is the one who didn't necessarily coin the terms because lots of other researchers had been using them.

but she put it in her book and that's the units of language acquisition. And that's, you know, was the book that I carried around with me, you know, on my clipboard because it, you know, it was really a series of PDFs. but it's, it's priceless and it's, it's just the beginnings of so much in our profession. Anyway, so when I began my journey as an SLP, it was back in the seventies.

And I had never met a Gestalt language processor. And so I worked in public schools for 20 years in Canada, 10 years in the United States and for 10 years. And I really did not. So I don't know how, what that means exactly, but I don't think they were part of our, I don't know, daily life as clinicians. I don't know how to answer that, that question that's in my mind, but.

Then in 1993, I came to Madison, Wisconsin, and I had a temporary job, three-year job, as a clinical instructor, it was called at the time, which is like a clinical associate professor now, which just means that you're working in the school clinic with grad students, and I did teach an undergrad class on clinical observation. So at any rate,

That was the year that an individual in Madison wanted to try to cure autism. Pause for dramatic emphasis here and replicate the study that Ivar Lovasz did when he was trying to cure autism. And in those days, it was the beginning of some of that research and

Marisha Mets (04:44.258)

You know, I mean, shall we just cut to the bottom of this? It didn't work. And so those kids who were considered, I kid you not, low-voss failures, came to our clinic at the university. And so I got to meet those first little ones. And one of them was clearly a Gestalt language processor, although I didn't know what the name would be.

except that, you know, this little individual is the one I quote in the book, Dylan is his name, who would say, let's get out of here. You know, I'd say to his mom, wow, that's quite a chunk of language, you know, where did that come from? Because you knew it wasn't self generated. You just knew that he mean he was not yet four years old and

let's get out of here with all that vehemence, know, wasn't really in his wheelhouse at the time. And so she said, that's what his big brother says. And it's really effective. You know, it makes everybody stop and think, let's see, why does he want to get out of here? And then the other one that he said a lot was, some more? Which,

You know, you can hear the mom saying or the dad or the teacher saying, once more. And the child who's echoing, you know, because this is delayed echolalia, like after the fact, what did big brother say that caused so much attention? You know, what did mom say that got you more milk? You say, once some more. And that's what Dr. Barry present.

did his research on that was also published in 1983. And it was exactly that. stage one, and he called it that. He had four stages of language development for children who use a Gestalt language process. Stage one is exactly that. Echoing or repeating language that has been heard before under meaningful situations,

Marisha Mets (07:03.99)

that caused great excitement or sadness or one of the ones that people always hear kids say is, you okay when they fall down? And it doesn't mean that they're okay. It means whatever they felt when the parents said as they fell, are you okay? And it could mean no.

I'm really badly hurt. It could mean I want to feel okay, but I don't right at this moment. It could mean, mom, please say that again, because I'd really love for you to recognize that I am not okay. So that's one of the classic gestalt that is part of stage one that Barry Prasant identified in his 1983 article. So it's a language and you've talked about this in some of the other

podcast, but it's language that has been grasped in another situation as meaningful, picked up voluntarily. This is all spontaneous. This isn't anything taught or, you know, instructed or say this or repeat after me, but it's picked up voluntarily and used spontaneously in another situation.

And like you already know, obviously, it's not to be taken necessarily literally. Sometimes it is, you know, let's get out of here really meant let's get out of here. But it also meant, you know, come on, guys, like, can you hurry? Can you get some more paint? Can you let me get a drink of water? You know, it can mean, you know, a myriad.

other things besides the one literal one. So that's stage one and supports at stage one, you know, are to acknowledge that's really the big support is to acknowledge that we understand. We may not understand literally like, you okay? You're scratching your head. Like, well, does she really mean that it hurts? Does she want me to, you know, kiss the boo boo?

Marisha Mets (09:25.986)

Does she want me to just ignore it and move on to the next fun thing? We can't see inside the minds of our kids, obviously, but it's a good clue. It's a good clue. And sometimes people say, it's so complicated. know, like, you know, others of your guests have said, it's not that we need to acknowledge exactly what it means at that moment. But what we do want to acknowledge is

we understand that that is meaningful language. And when we understand that, that it's meaningful language, that's all we really need to acknowledge to get that what we would call the bingo eye contact that says, who this person gets me, you know, that's just about all we really need to do. And then we can prove our acumen as, you know, detectives after that. But the

first step is the acknowledgement just that it is shared, is communicative, and when we acknowledge that, that child becomes a communicator. You know, and like we all say, gosh, back in grad school, we thought that we had to make them be a communicator by doing something that we thought was, you know, right or typical or proper or whatever. No.

It's up to us. The child already has language in their heads. And that's something that we always say is that there isn't any pre-verbal, you know, necessary like eye contact. No joint referencing. No. Does there need to be, you know, pointing and gestures? No. That child already has language probably from the time they were like 12 months old, you know,

or earlier, you know, for some kids, they had language in their heads. And do we understand it? Not necessarily, but we do have to recognize that they're like five steps ahead of us, you know, in this language development thing. And we, our job is to really to believe their lived experience, if you will, if you use that kind of terminology and believe them, it's like, you know, believe the children.

Marisha Mets (11:54.114)

I mean, that could be our mantra. Stage one. So stage one, is that one called delayed echolalia or is there a different name? No, you're right. Okay. So the terminology is something that gets very, very confusing. It is indeed delayed echolalia, but you know, different people like different terminologies and some people don't like the term.

delayed echolalia anymore because it used to be, you know, a pathology. We used to think that it was pathological and we were supposed to extinguish it. So some people don't really want to use the term echolalia at all. But then there are other people who would way prefer to use the term echolalia because as let's just say some autistic adults really think that our focus on Gestalt

language development has kind of almost usurped the value of echoing. And so if I today, being, you know, fully able to use self-generated grammar, want to echo what you just said, I would say, is that what people call delayed echolalia? So I might echo you.

I might, I might because just the sound of your voice express that way better than if I had tried to say it myself because I don't sound like I'm, I mean, your question was authentic. And so sometimes when we're thinking about, you know, adults who use language that is echoed, they're not necessarily

gestalts in the same sense as a kid. For a kid, you know, let's get out of here, could not have been broken down. But when I echoed you and said, you know, is that what they call delayed echolalia? I can break that down. And so that definition of a gestalt, a linguistic gestalt or a language gestalt is the one that Ann Peters defined.

Marisha Mets (14:18.958)

And so sometimes we have to differentiate between, we talking about development, language development? Or are we talking about later on when I choose to echo you or, you know, anyone else who I might quote, if you will. But generally speaking, yes. Okay, great. So stage one is delayed echolalia. And that's when kiddos are using these gestalts and they can't be broken down.

And the best thing that we can do as clinicians is acknowledge the communication. Does that sound like a good recap? Perfect. Okay. And then what about stage two? What is that stage called and what does that look like? Okay. So rather than say the name of it, which gets everyone all confused, we'll just say that what happens very naturally. And that's what my research was all about is what do kids do naturally?

And what kids do naturally within a, let's call it linguistically rich environment. So people are aware. It doesn't have to be a professional. It could be parents, could be someone in that child's life is aware that stage two exists. Stage two is when there are enough gestalts in that child's head that they

can find the commonalities and either break down a long gestalt like a whole movie. It could be a whole movie. so breaking it down means just the episode or it could be an episode, could be the gestalt and breaking it down means, I'll say, this is the fast forwarding that kids do when they get to the part that they really are wanting to focus on.

know, the way, I did think I'd just go to England and go to the city and say, this is Hercules.

Marisha Mets (16:21.442)

So sometimes the breaking it down means to make it shorter, actually focusing on the part that they really, really want and just fast forwarding the rest. And it sometimes means that this whole movie was visualized in a child's head and the breaking it down means extracting the language piece or the acoustic piece, the auditory piece from the entirety.

That's, so it can be any of these things, including finding commonalities among different chunks or different scripts or different pieces of delayed echolalic language and mixing and matching. And so like in the case of let's get out of here, want some more? You know, this child, and this is the real example, could say, let's get more.

You know, once I'm out of here. And so they don't necessarily sound like the original in terms of intonation necessarily. And that's sometimes as a clue that kids are doing something with those original gestalt that is doing it. You can do anything with it. You can, you can make it intonationally different. You can change, you know, part of it to a question like,

Want some more? If a child says, want some more, you know, that would be a stage two. So any of those kinds of changes. And the term for it is an antiquated term that we're kind of stuck with. But when we're explaining it to other people, we don't have to say, that's mitigation. You must learn the word mitigation. The word mitigation doesn't really work in very many languages like zero.

And so we have to explain it. And so that's what we just do. And we use the term if we want to be really accurate and say, yeah, mix and match or ways of mitigating ways of changing. So we have to explain that to people, but that's the official term is mitigation or, it was also called in the old days, was called mitigated gestalt or mitigated echolalia.

Marisha Mets (18:47.424)

even like changed in some way. Yeah, that makes sense. So in stage two, they're mixing and max matching their gestalts. So the big pieces from stage one, we get to see them like mix and match them. So that makes sense. Anything else on stage two? Well, so supports for stage two. Okay. So first of all, we have to recognize that this

process is natural, so kids will do it. You know, whether we like it or not, you know, it's going to happen. So we might as well be there with them and be partners. So that's really the critical element is being a partner. And when you hear something that is mixed and matched or changed in some way to recognize it, there's a tendency, you know, now that we have so much media,

language that we didn't have in the old days, obviously, but there's a tendency when we hear media language to say, that's a Gestalt, you know, and it's not. If it's been changed from the original, it's a mitigation.

So an example would be.

called the doctor and the doctor said, no more monkeys jumping on the bed. Is that a gestalt? Not for that child because they used to sing the whole thing. You know, it's unintelligible, but the child sang the whole thing. So when they can sing just a part of it, it's a mitigation.

Marisha Mets (20:42.878)

So that's, suppose, one thing that we should be aware of is that because it's from media doesn't make it automatically a gestalt.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then anything else for stage two or should we go on to three? no, that brings up one other really important thing. so kids at stage one, little kids at stage one are just absolutely not intelligible. You know, we can't ever say, no, he's not intelligible, therefore we should do X or Y or Z. You know, kids are not intelligible.

typically if they're little kid until stage two. And that's the reason. As you know, at first they were musical kids, know, the intonation babies that we all talk about. And so what does intelligibility sound like at stage one? It sounds like, you know,

you know, that's Beth pretty intelligible. You know, we don't expect like, you know, phonemes and phonetic and consonants and vowels and, you know, kids just can't do it. They just can't do it. And so stage two is absolutely phenomenally powerful because kids are understood for the first time often. And people say, he's talking.

And he's singing this song, you know? I go back in my memory. I think he's been singing this song for like a year, but I didn't understand it because it was too indistinct.

Marisha Mets (22:32.052)

Yeah. And then, does that bring us to stage three? So it does look like it is. And so basically stage three is just another mitigation stage basically, but it creates the brain shift that, you know, we all have been hoping for when we thought we could, you know, support a child as if they were an analytic processor.

Where's that single word? Where's that single word? Well, there it is. And so at stage three, it happens naturally, just naturally. You know, we don't have to do compliance. We don't have to do teaching. We don't have to do reinforcement. We don't have to do, you know, sit at the table. We don't have to do anything because it happens naturally. And, you know, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, if language was, and this is somewhat what we see as clinicians.

If language was a part of experience, you know, where's that going to live in most children's heads? Is it going to be left brain analytic word plus word? Like we've tried to force kids into being. No, we tried that, you know, we all tried that in some form or another, even if it was just in our minds. But if, if kids are starting with language as part of experience,

and they learn that experiences are multiple where language can be used in different experiences and can be mixed and matched. Then we're helping them to bring that language down to a place that, you know, I just call it the corpus callosum moment when it's available. And once it's available,

you know, and we call it referential because it's available referentially. It's like this moment now, you know, before it was like, I got a yellow one. I think I got a yellow one says this child, but then all of a sudden yellow.

Marisha Mets (24:51.53)

And what happens then, our job is to again, acknowledge, you know, it's like, we don't worry. We don't say, wait a minute. He used to say, I think I got another one. What happened to that intonation? What happened to that long, you know, sentence, you know? And so as SLPs, then our job is really to help parents and others in school, elsewhere.

saying, no, it's not regression. Remember how we wanted those single words so badly? We've got them. And once we've got that single word, now that child, not we've got it, but the child has it, now that the child has it, they are able to add yellow plus red and yellow plus marker. And that is where stage three is this

magic moment of referencing. And we watch kids do that physical referencing. You know, that's one reason we don't want to teach kids to point, you know, as ABA might, because we lose that slew that stage three is happening. Because at stage three, referencing might be like if you've ever watched my video that, yeah, there's a little video of my little friend Chloe that

uses referencing by holding something out like green, green. And it's just, it is profound. And you know, this is the kind of thing that if you're like an academic researcher type, you know, language learning lab type of researcher, you don't get to see. It's only parents and clinicians and people who really are deeply involved with kids who get to see this. And it's just

It's just unbelievable when it happens. So our job is to acknowledge once again, we don't have to do a lot other than recognize that it's real and help a child know that it's right. Kids are not confused by it and that's what I find just amazing. Kids are fine with it. They love it. It's more of a cognitive thing, you know? But teachers worry.

Marisha Mets (27:14.866)

And sometimes parents worry. And so we say, no, it's so natural and beautiful and you wait to see what's going to happen next. That's so interesting that if we're taking language samples and maybe just looking at MLU where maybe last year we were seeing them produce these like five to seven word sentences, if we're thinking in the old way.

And then now we're seeing single words like that might if we don't know about this that might be kind of concerning like what their ML you've dropped by six But it's actually really if we're thinking about it in these stages They're understanding like they're able to break down those individual words Which then as we get to the future stages we can use those to read like to build so many more combinations So you are so right and

You know how it is. And the other thing that we should say right now is that, you know, we all were taught that there's this differentiation between receptive language and expressive language. And now we're looking at processing as a unitary phenomenon. So what happens at stage three and into stage four is, is, you know, parents will often say to us, his receptive language just got better.

And we say, yeah, we know, we know. It's language processing. It's all a phenomenon that happens all together.

But yes, you know, those single words have individual referential meaning. And like you say, you know, there was no MLU and yellow one, you know, even if we can hear yellow one, you know, it's not, it's not individual, you know, just like Ann Peters said, and I always go back to Ann Peters because the definition of a gestalt, you know, you think back to stage one is it's unanalyzed.

Marisha Mets (29:22.036)

So there aren't, you know, individual words. It's a chunk. It's sort of like an MLU of one.

So what happens next? So in stage three, they're starting to break down those gestalts into single words or shorter combinations. Then what happens? Like, what do we expect to see next? So what we expect to see next is going to be a little bit age dependent. I mean, all of these things, you know, we have to always put into context, you know, the age of the child, what the background, you know,

of the child was, were they taught to say certain things, which gets it all a bit confusing. And we'll come back to that, you know, at another time. But anyway, let's skip over that for for right now. But let's just look at natural language and the natural language they picked up from their environment. And so what we look at then next is a natural movement from stage three, which is like, you know,

Phone marker.

Marker, phone, yellow, yellow, which is very referential and really not grammar at all. And then in stage four, there's a natural movement towards bits, tiny bits, tiny bits of grammar. And it's not like, you know, some people will say or used to say,

Marisha Mets (31:01.918)

Well, then we can teach them grammar. Well, no, no, no, no, And we're not teaching anything. This is natural development. So we are supporting. And we use something that came from the old research on syntactic development called developmental sentence types, DST, and developmental sentence scoring, DSS.

which were part of this whole phenomenon back in the 60s and 70s where natural grammar development was recorded and normed actually on ALPs. But our research showed that it's exactly the same for GLPs. And that's what the beauty of this longitudinal research was that Barry Prisant recognized in 1983

We needed to look at this in more depth. mean, he talked about stage one and two and three and four, but he didn't ever intend to say, grammar development is gonna all happen like in this three month period of time. We knew enough about grammar development back in those days to say, it's probably gonna take a while. But that was partly what his wisdom was when he said we need longitudinal.

research to say how do kids really do this? And so what we found out is that kids do this very small steps at a time and it all has to do with meaning. You know, in the vernacular that we all learned in grad school, it has to do with semantic relationships. What are the relationships among qualities that are meaningful?

And grammar, you when you think about grammar, think that's all it is really, is just a way to put words with concepts. So anybody who says, now we get to teach grammar. No, we're never going to teach grammar. There are times when a child is in stage five or six that one might say, you know what? That's an irregular verb. And you know what?

Marisha Mets (33:24.202)

we don't put an ED on the ending of all verbs. So there are some grammar rules that once a child is truly metacognitive, you know, or meta-linguistic, that we might talk about that stuff, but not right away, not at stage four. At stage four, it's all about meaning. And then we want to say, you know, as the kid is like looking for the yellow marker, like, you know, where? Marker, marker, last.

Oh, found it. And we want to keep our utterances to match the child as we always do. So we're going to match, you know, each stage of the way we're going to match the child. And so right now this child is just emerging from phone marker.

And so we want to respect that and use grammar judiciously to superimpose on the meaning that they are already expressing or wanting to express. And so, you know, just like we do in other stages, we're going to provide language, you know, we could call it language models, but you know, that's probably overstating it a little bit. It's more like we're just going to talk.

but we're going to be cognizant of where the child is. So it grows slowly. Stage four is enormous. And it goes all the way from, you know, phone, marker, my phone, my phone, marker, marker. And then we're going to hesitate, spend our time. It's all a bit more deliberate now. Nothing about stage one.

was deliberate. It was the language that comes from somewhere else that is being conjured up for this situation. Stage two, you might say intentionality increases somewhat. It's a bit more, you know, focused and, but it's not really intentional. It's not like, you know, we're not really looking at like executive function or something like that yet. Stage three becomes intentional, you know?

Marisha Mets (35:43.686)

Stage four is. And so one thing that happens at stage four is kids often become really pretty disfluent. And it's not like a traditional disfluency. It's not like that. But it's something that if we understand that it's natural and we understand that it's really linguistic, you know, and there's the term for it is linguistic amazing.

And mazing, that all comes from the ALP literature that shows that from a normative standpoint, the numbers of mazes, like reformulations, abandoned utterances, repeated first consonants, repeated words, all of that actually increases as kids get older. ALP kids from stage three, I mean, from age three to age seven.

And we have actual norms from that, from the systematic analysis of language transcription, the SALT stuff. And so we think, well, for ALP kids, there's going to be more of that as they develop new grammar. So for GLP kids, we know it's going to be even more than that. So that's what, you know, when we get scared and we hear this like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yo, you know, and that's like a real example. I mean, that's what kids do at stage four. And so our job is to relax and to not worry and to realize it's normal and natural. And, you know, we don't want to jump in and say, say yellow. No, no, no, no.

We want to just be natural communication partners and respect the fact that it's just normal.

Marisha Mets (37:45.96)

Yeah, and so Dr. Barry Prasant's work ended at stage four. But I've heard you talk about additional stages. Can you tell us what that looks like? So stage four is huge, as you can imagine, going all the way from, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all the way from there to, I got a yellow marker. You know, and that would be

real stage four grammar. It would also be, I got a yellow marker and yellow paper. I got two yellows. So in stage four, you have all of the basic verb tenses, you have the conjunction and, you have all the pronouns, you have the beginning, you have a future tense, like a basic future tense, like, I'm gonna get yellow.

I can't say yellow now. You know, I got yellow yesterday. I got it. You know, so all the future tense, all the simple future tense, all the simple past tense, then stage five is then tons more conjunctions, tons more questions, all the WH questions.

And then ways of putting together clauses. So like, no, not now, not, not till tomorrow. You got it, but, but I don't have it. You got it, but I don't, you know, et cetera. So there's these things that, you know, are, you know, you could say it's more complex grammar, but it's also what it is really is more opportunities to put together.

semantic relationships with words. That's what it really is. You know, and not everything, you know, some of it's really stage six and it's pretty sophisticated stuff. before I get the yellow one, I need red. You know, I really need red before yellow. So like taking timeframes and switching them. like before and after, and then embedded clauses like if I get red,

Marisha Mets (40:09.608)

then I'll find yellow. But if I don't find red, I don't care about yellow, you know, et cetera. So basically you can put together all these semantic relationships that, you imagine like a little ALP child doesn't get terribly sophisticated. You know, even though they have stage six grammar, the kinds of relationships they put together at age, you know, four or five.

you know, aren't going to be terribly complicated. But for our GLP kids who are going to be a bit older, usually, they may have some pretty sophisticated things to say. Like, if you don't want me to, then why did you bring me? You know, et cetera. And then what would the difference between stage five and six be? does that six ends with every

combination that we can imagine in a particular language. And I will tell you that English turns out to be one of the easier languages in some ways. You know, I just did a course in Turkey and it's really complicated in Turkish because everything is a suffix. And so you add all this grammar with the suffixes. And I think

this kid, how does this kid even figure it out? And I say to them, you I said to the people, you know, in Turkey, how do kids do this? You know, you read a little bit about Turkish, you know, grammar development like I did, I picked up Wikipedia right away and I learned a little bit about Turkish grammar. And they say, well, kids in Turkey do this and this and this, but they always miss this and this. And I said to, you know, one of the people, you know, do kids, you know,

miss those and they're like what what you know and they would say yeah they do but it's so natural that nobody even thinks about.

Marisha Mets (42:16.81)

So it's like the suffix for the suffix for I and U is built in at the end of the sentence. And some of the suffixes that kids don't get, you know, they do have some statistics for kids who are like developmentally language delayed. And they say, well, they can get the I and the me and the U, but they can't really get like, you other ones. And I said,

you know, is this true? And I said, we don't even know. I mean, who pays attention to that? You know, you're just a kid. You just pick up on the language around you.

Yeah, okay, awesome. So that's a super helpful overview. I love that. And then in the show notes, I'll link to your book and Peter's work. And then I'll do a recap of the stages as you went through them. So if anyone listening just wants a quick recap, you can find that. And then you also...

Marge, also mentioned developmental sentence types and developmental sentence scoring. And we don't have time to go into all of those things, but I'll link some, you have some beautiful resources for those things. So I'll include links to like the quick resources and things that you mentioned in case listeners are wanting to dive in. And then another thing that will include Marge is going to be recording a super in-depth

like series of webinars or videos for us going into even more detail on all things, consult language processing. And so I'll include a link to that and it'll be free to access, right? Excellent, excellent. That'll be a lot of fun. Your platform is just really making a huge difference here, Marisha.

Marisha Mets (44:20.922)

And I'm just really grateful for your time. And I love your stories because you started just a quick recap. You started working at the university. You were introduced to Dr. Barry Prasant's work and you knew that there needed to be more research, but you wanted it to be very clinically focused. And so you did a lot of work in implementing this and kind of

organizing the frameworks and you've created a really great book to help other clinicians with that. And I don't know, I just think it's such a cool story of how you took this research and brought it into practice and are implementing it and are making it really accessible for other SLPs. Well, thanks Marcia. You know, honestly, it just felt like the thing to do. mean, Barry Prisant never said to me, now do this Marge, I, you know, but

That's how the 1983 article ended. And I just thought, oh, well, SLPs are going to pick up the charge and we're all going to be doing this longitudinal qualitative research. I didn't realize that other people weren't doing it. I had no idea. I honestly had no idea. So I didn't consider myself different or unusual. And our clinic really lent itself to that. mean, we started at the university with this

individual I was telling you about Dylan. And then, you know, by the time I left that job, you know, parents were saying, what are we going to do now? And I said, I don't really know. But I think we need a place maybe to do this in and we need some slides, I think, you know, we need some sandboxes and things like that. And so that was when my clinic was born.

And it was right next to campus at the time because I was used to working with students. And so we just kind of continued that my partner and I continued that kind of way of doing things until the kids got bigger. And so after three years, we realized that the slide, you know, this little whatever it's called play skills slide, wasn't enough resistance to climb up and get well regulated. we needed a

Marisha Mets (46:42.282)

really tall slide, which meant we needed a really tall loft. So we moved into a new space in 2000. And then in 2003, then we became a nonprofit. And that really, really helped because then people could donate for scholarships and, you know, we could continue things. So we had a lot of luxuries, I will just say. I mean, not that we set up the clinic very quickly. took years and years, as you can imagine, but we can talk about that.

another time we can talk a little bit more about regulation. my goodness. There is so much to dive into here. but I'm super excited that we'll have that in depth video series where we can talk about all the things and finally do the topic justice. But hopefully this was a nice intro for SL keys listening. And then again, go check out for listeners, check out the show notes.

for the quick overview and links to resources, including the more in-depth videos. And yeah, I think that's a wrap for today. Thank you, Marisha. It's been fun. Thank you.