Question
What ideas can you offer for improving word-finding difficulties that can sometimes be a part of a person's reading disability?
Answer
This is a tricky question, as a word-finding difficulty has a different meaning to different people. My initial response would be that we are talking about a person who is struggling with reading and is experiencing one of two different symptoms. The first might be that the individual has some examples of not accessing certain words, or is slow or hesitant in accessing certain words, when talking. In cases like this, one has to ask: Why is this happening? For most of us, we exhibit word finding difficulties when the demands of the situation exceed our current capabilities. For some individuals, the demands exceed capacity more often. We need to look at the linguistic and non-linguistic contexts to determine what factor(s) may be leading to these difficulties. Likely, there is something about the linguistic context (need to communicate more abstract thoughts, more advanced syntax, enter into narrative discourse) that causes these difficulties to surface. Once you determine what area(s) of language cause these difficulties to arise, you can tackle those areas, strengthening the skills, and thus leading to less occurrences of word-finding problems. A second issue might be that a person who is struggling with reading has a difficult time decoding, which may be labeled as a word-retrieval problem. In cases such as these, it is important to conduct a miscue analysis (error analysis) of the individual's oral reading and determine how s/he "attacks" new or non-sight words. Does the individual use a phonemic blending across the word, or does the person "guess and go" (e.g., look at the first few letters of a word and guess what it is)? If the latter is the case, then not only will the individual read the majority of words incorrectly, but poor or faulty orthographic representations of the words (pictures in our heads) will be stored/learned. Thus, in the future, it may look like words read before can't be, and thus, a label of word finding be provided. We need to help individuals correctly decode words, leading to more effective and complete storing of mental images of words.
Dr. Kenn Apel is professor and chair of communicative disorders and sciences at Wichita State University. His area of teaching and research interest is reading and spelling.
