Difficulty Maintaining Topics and Conversational Turns

Overview

Children with speech and language delays often times have difficulty with topic maintenance and conversational turn taking. They may present with disorganized speech that is unrelated to the topic at hand, causing them to jump from one subject to another. This makes it difficult for the conversational partner to keep track of what the child is talking about. In addition, a child may talk too short, too long, or talk over their conversational partner.

It is important to note that children interactions with other children don't always "make sense" or follow social rules - that is okay and perfectly normal! While structured scripts might be beneficial, it is not sustainable for every experience a child may encounter. Children need to be taught how their minds work, how their behaviors affects the way others perceive and respond to them, and how this impacts their own emotions, responses, and relationships with others across a wide variety of social contexts (e.g., school, playground, home).

Assessment

Pragmatic Language Observation Scale (PLOS): A 30-item, norm-referenced rating scale designed for teachers or knowledgable professionals to assess students’ daily classroom spoken language behaviors.

• • Pro: Provides important statistical feedback on these skills from a teacher or caregiver resulting in normative data and percentile rank

  • Con: Scoring can be subjective based upon the individual using the assessment

Conversational Speech Sample

• • Pro: More natural and may elicit longer periods of speech than standardized assessment

  • Con: However, this may be difficult to compare to normative samples and provide percentile ranks in these skills.

Intervention

Use comments and nonverbal gestures (e.g., nodding, smiling)

• • • Pro: Helps your conversational partner know you are listening without "saying" anything

    • Con: May prove difficult for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other pragmatic language disorders, as nonverbal communication can prove especially difficult for this population

Use a variety of wh- open-ended questions (e.g., "What do you think will happen next?") rather than using yes/no or questions that will elicit short, single word responses.

• • • Pro: Prompts the child to provide longer answers, leading to meaningful interactions

    • Con: Might be difficult for the child to answer, causing them to become uninterested or frustrated

Alternative Approach

One alternative approach for parents and caregiver to utilize are visual or tactile cues for "turn to talk" such as red flags, green flags, or something for the child to hold in their hand when it is their turn in the conversation. A train track can act as a visual aid, with the train itself going "off-track" when the child begins to stray away from the conversation. Allow the child to be in control of the train track, and let them decide if the conversational partner is "on-track" in when having a conversation that is centered around an interest to the child!