Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have trouble not only in behavior, but also in language skills. They are more likely to have language understanding difficulties than a simple language delay. There may be no early developmental history of speech and language problems – the language problems may only become apparent as the child grows. These children have language difficulties related to their impulsive and poor organizational skills such as,
- Problems with classroom discourse
- Poor writing skills
- Narrations and conversations
- Word-finding problems
- Difficulties inferring meaning
- Problems with generative language Social language problems.
Children may have confused story-telling skills in some or all of the following areas:
- Keeping on the topic
- Describing something clearly and precisely
- Starting at the beginning of a story, then giving the middle and finishing off with the end!
- They may focus on small details – but not give the ‘whole picture’ of the story.
- If the story is about a problem, they may not really know what the problem is.
- They may have difficulty remembering words – and use lots of ‘fillers’ like ‘thing, thingy, it, um, er, you know’.
Some strategies that can help them are:
• When your child is trying to tell you a story, relieve his/her stress by sitting with your child and maintaining eye contact and interest. Be an active and interested listener!
• Cue your child in to the sequence of the story e.g. ‘That sounds great! Now, tell me again, what happened first? Then what happened? What happened at the end?’
• If your child goes off, keep bringing her/him back to the topic e.g. ‘Hang on, what happened after you did…?’
• Ask your child specific questions e.g. ‘Tell me what happened when you first got to school?’ rather than ‘What happened at school today?’
• Lead your child’s story e.g. ‘And after Mrs Rani said hello to the new boy, she said…?’
• Use the first sound to help your child find the correct word if he/she is struggling e.g. ‘ass…’ for a word starting with ‘s’
• Correct your child by giving a choice of 2 words e.g. ‘Did you mean he threw
the ball, or he caught the ball?’
• Give your child the opportunity to retell their story to a new listener (e.g. Dad, then Grandma). This allows them to practice and improve their story-telling skills with familiar material.