Communication Development in the Early Age and Negative Impacts on Personal Relationships - Essay Example

Introduction Communication is an integral important feature of life. Whenever there is interaction between two people, communication occurs. As you are reading this paper, I am actually communicating to you my thoughts and ideas synthesized in a written form. The nature of communication is that it is a process of sharing and receiving messages and information at a certain place and a certain time. The most basic form of communication is talking and writing to another person. Thoughts and ideas can also be expressed using nonverbal communication such as body language and facial expressions. Visual communication occurs when ideas are relayed thru images and pictures such as video, photos and films. With the advances in technology, electronic communication thru mobile networks, e-mails, chatting and other satellite broadcasts are now possible. In short, any form of interaction with other people can be considered as communication. Effective communication is essential not only in our personal relationships but also employment, business dealings, community interaction and education. It is essential that the message and the meaning associated with it can be understood clearly. Failure in communication is quite common as there are many barriers to effective communication. While cultural differences are understandable sources of ineffective communication, even members of the same family can interpret messages differently. One reason for this is that a member has a learning and speaking disability. In this paper, I will be discussing and analyzing three communication scenarios where communication failure occurs. These scenarios include language impairment due to motor disorder, autism and stuttering. The goal is to understand its effects on communication and more importantly, on the future prospect of the individual. Scenario 1: Today in my studies, I read about 12 year old James whose condition provided a case study for the author. James had a congenital motor disorder in the form of mild cerebral palsy. I learned from this case study that children with cerebral palsy not only had their movements uncoordinated but also suffered from learning and communication development disabilities. Due to their limited control of facial expression, gesture and speech, James words are slurred and often unrecognizable. Communicating with a person with motor disorder is quite complicated as the typical response to questions is a confused gaze. If a trained person like me finds it difficult to manage the situation, then what about untrained people? The research of Michellin & O’Brien (2005), Levine & Nourse (1998) and Seo et.al. (2008) have shown that people who have motor disorders, in general, are less likely to find good opportunities in personal relationships and employment. They also require special types of education which are costly to bear. Children with cerebral palsy or other motor disorders interact with their communication partners differently from children who are undergoing typical development. Communication with a familiar partner occurs only to meet a particular purpose rather than for general conversation or chatting. It has also been observed that communication partners such as parents and siblings often take control of the conversation in an effort to prevent communications breakdown resulting from the difficulties in understanding the child’s signals. Communication partners tend to take more turns in conversing and introduce most of the topics while the children assume a respondent role. As a result, the children rarely initiate conversational exchanges and ignore their turns. Their response is restricted to simple functions such as answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’, nod of acknowledgement and asking for information only on the objects within view. In effect, there is an inequality in the communication process (Shuster & Adamson, 2003) Research conducted by Yoder and Warren (2002) indicated that such restricted patterns of communication with children having cerebral palsy could hamper the communication development and consequently limit his access to education and employment. There has been significant research on how to address the communication problem of these impaired people. Interventions such as improving the children’s intelligibility by extensive speech production training and the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems have been investigated. These systems require a broader modality of communication such as the use of visual methods. Nevertheless, research by Lund & Light (2007) indicated that these interventions can only achieve limited success if the children are not encouraged to be independent in communication in all the modes available to them. Instead of asserting ourselves on the children, they can be taught how to start and develop conversations and how to produce signals for a wider range of communication functions. Making the children learn how to make requests has also been found to provide children greater power to control their environment and consequently increasing their communication independence. Partners should also appreciate the fact that the child cannot easily produce quick reactions and that fast-paced conversation can prevent children from initiating or even from responding (Young et al, 2002). People with motor disorders aside from cerebral palsy need to have their communication partner to undergo training (Wright, Hunt & Stanley, 2001). According to the Transactional Theory of Development, both the child and the partner should continuously adapt to each other’s behaviours (Drake, 2001). However, one can notice that the effort of change lies mostly on the partner. Indeed, communication partners such as parents, education staff and friends should take the initiative as the children cannot be expected to adapt to their partners. Training partners finds application not only in helping children with motor problems but also in treating children with language impairment and developmental disabilities. Programs adopted are usually those that train partners to take a more responsive approach to interaction. For example, partners are trained to observe the child more closely for signs of communication and be gracious enough to follow their lead. The physical environment can also be designed to stimulate the child’s interest. Statements requiring a yes or no should be restated to elicit a more comprehensive response. Instead of asking ‘Did you like it?’, partners should say ‘How did you find the taste of the ice cream?’. Instead of asking ‘Did you go to the living room?”, partners should ask ‘Where have you gone?’. These simple re-statements have been found to make children more active in interaction, produce more comments, increase their vocabulary and take more turns in the conversation (Yoder & Warren, 2002; Light et. al., 1985). Scenario 2: Autism After class, I visited Cody who was an 11 year child and a relative of mine. I just hear that he has been diagnosed with Autism. The doctors say this is the reason why Cody has a very limited and sometimes incoherent speech. This is why he was saying ‘you’ when he meant ‘I’. In asking for a drink, for example, Cody says ‘You want a drink’ instead of ‘I want a drink’. Doctors also pinpointed this as the cause of Cody’s repetition of words and phrases we said to him. Autism, frequently referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is characterized by marked social and communication impairment including repetitive or restricted behaviour as exhibited by Cody. Estimates suggest that ASD occurs in 1 out of 150 children with higher likelihood for boys than girls. The problem with ASD is the heterogeneity of symptoms and severity making treatment for children frequently challenging. Communication development for autistic individuals is possible but is severely impaired. Miscommunication then is highly probable. Several methods for addressing ASD have been formulated to varying and limited degrees of success. This included applied behaviour analysis which involves operant conditioning and one-on-one instruction designed to inculcate positive behaviours and eliminate negative ones. There is also the developmental intervention strategy which stresses the role and involvement of parents in ASD treatment as it believes that language development is reliant on strong, positive-child interactions. Other methods include video modelling and other school based-interventions. All of these methods seek to enable the autistic child to properly relate objects with language. However, these methods are limited because it focuses on enabling the child to properly speak when half of all children with ASD have been found to remain nonverbal. How do we manage to improve then the communication capability of children with ASD? Sundberg et al. (1998) proposes that focus should be given more to providing non-speech communication methods. This is where Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) methods become useful. The reason for this, as Simpson et al. (2005) argued, was due to the fact that children with ASD respond strongly to AAC methods such as aided symbols, manual signing and speech generating devices. One of the AAC methods is the Picture Communication Symbols (PECS) which involve the use of printed cards to symbolize words and meaning. Children are initiated into the PECS program by presenting them a limited set of card that would gradually increase as the child’s repertoire develops. Instruction occur in phases such as basic exchange of card and acquiring the attention of partners to discriminating among multiple cards ultimately leading to the formation of sentences and answering of questions through the use of cards. The final goal of the PECS is to enable ASD children to develop verbal communication by establishing first functional communication (Seinfield & Brandt, 1998). An example of the PECS strategy is shown in Figure 1: Figure 1: AAC Formation of ‘May I have a cup of tea please?’ In Figure 1, we can see a set of pictures where the child chooses pictures to form the sentence. AAC through PECS relies heavily on the interest of children with visual figures. Through the process of teaching children to associate words with drawings, it is hoped that the child can begin to form coherent communication analogies and lead him to speak it out as well. Instead of cards, Cody has a gadget which his special education teacher operates. The process is complex and grudgingly slow. Nonetheless, after 15 hours of PECS training, Cody has shown significant initiations to his teacher and is responding also well to his teacher’s initiations. Scenario 3: Stuttering Jenny, the younger sister of a close friend of mine, was stuttering when she spoke when I met her when she was 3 years old. We did not regard this as something serious because, after all, she was still very young. I remembered Jenny because I met her again yesterday, now 7 years old. When I asked her how she was and if she remembered me, she did not reply and instead hid herself from view. I learned from her sister that she was very shy to speak because she was still stuttering. Stuttering consists of an abnormally high frequency and duration of stoppages in the forward flow of speech. These stoppages can take the form of repetitions, prolonga­tions of sounds, and blockages of the airflow required for fluent speech. According to Susca (2001), oral communi­cation is such an important part of being human that an impairment of speech like stuttering, can easily cause miscommunication. Children who stutter have learning and communication development levels better than their counterparts who have cerebral palsy and autism. Nonetheless, they are still cause of concern because stuttering can lead to decreased learning and communication development due to the development of inferiority complex. Children who stutter are often subject to ridicule especially by their peers and they develop a sense of being inferior to other people that have been shown to result to withdrawn social behaviour. This longitudinal study by Alden and Wayne (2005) also found that children who stutter have develop communication ‘shyness’ which inhibited them from taking part in job and educational opportunities. Scenario 4: Dyslexia In my trip today to a special education centre, I was treated into being an observer of a class for children with dyslexia. A special education teacher was guiding the children, about 6 of them, into an AAC module which again consisted of pictures. The reason behind this training, I was informed, was that dyslexic children are believed to have reading difficulties because they see letters backwards or in reverse order making it hard for them to understand written material. Pictures were to be used as a form of preliminary training gradually moving on into written material in stages. Scenario 5: Dyscalculia Interestingly, while I was on my second day of my trip to the special education centre, a thought came upon me. If there were people who had difficulty reading written material, then what about people who had difficulty recognizing figures. My curiosity led me to ask a special education teacher and she told me that they have indeed 3 children with such disability but they are currently in vacation status. What is common among the three children was that they find it hard to associate words with figures. For example, given a word and a set of figures, the children cannot easily recognize what the word should look like. Scenario 6: Deaf I was always fascinated with the sign language and I realized then that it would be a proper venue for me to learn more about barriers to effective communication if I visited a learning institution for the deaf. Children learn spoken language primarily by hearing it but deafness inhibits their learning potential and makes it difficult for them to speak clearly. Not only that, they also find it difficult to read and write since they are limited in spoken language which can be considered as a precursor to these learning stages. The children primarily learn thru the sign language given by a special education instructor. Conclusion There are various ways communication can fail. In the discussion above, congenital motor disorder, autism and stuttering can derail communication development in early age and can have negative impacts on the child’s future career, personal relationships and education. Children with cerebral palsy find it hard to express themselves properly. Those with autism find it hard to properly associate meanings with words. Children who stutter develop inferiority complex as they get shy from their disorder. There are ways of improving their situation such as AAC and intensive but cooperative training. In any case, these situations clearly show that there are barriers to communication starting from childhood which should be properly addressed to ensure that the person will have the necessary language skills to take part in the world. References: Alden, K. & Wayne, H. (2005). Assessing the impact of stuttering on social growth and development Communication Disorders Quarterly 15, 31–35. Drake, J. (2001). Disability, society, and the individual. Journal of Learning Disability 34, 16-20. Levine, P. & Nourse, S.W. (1998). What follow-up studies say about postschool life for young men and women with learning disabilities: A critical look at the literature. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 31, 212-233. Light, J., Collier, B. & Parnes, P. (1985). Communicative interaction between young nonspeaking physically disabled children and their primary caregivers: Part II- Communicative Function. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 1, 98-107. Lund, S.K. & Light, J. (2007). Long-term outcomes for individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication Part II-Communicative Interaction. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 23, 1-15. Michellin, G. & O’Brien, P. (2005). Mechanisms for improving parent-child interaction for the handicapped child. Language and Communication 30, 24-28. Seinfield J. & Brandt, J. (1998). Communication thru pictures: Outcomes for young children with learning disabilities. Journal of Child Language 18, 132-138. Seo, Y., Abbott, R.D., & Hawkins, J.D. (2008). Outcome Status of students with learning disabilities at ages 21 and 24. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 41, 300-314. Shuster, M. & Adamson, K. (2003). Outcomes in learning using augmentative and alternative communication for preschool children. Disability & Society, 17. 11-15. Simpson, R., de Boer-Ott, S., Griswold, D., Myles, B. S., Byrd, S., Ganz, J., et al. (2005). Autism spectrum disorders:Interventionsand treatments for children and youth. Thousand Oaks, CA:Corwin Press Sundberg, M.L. & Partington, J.W. (1998). Teaching Language to Children with autism or other developmental disabilities. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41, 23-32. Susca, M., & Healey, E. C. (2001). Perceptions of simulated stut­tering and fluency. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 61–72. Wright, M. Hunt, L. & Stanley, O. (2001). Quantification of object manipulation in children with cerebral palsy. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 4, 197-195. Yoder, PJ & Warren, SF (2002). Effect of prelinguistic milieu teaching and parent responsivity education on dyads involving children with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 45, 1297-1310. Young A., Beitchman, J.H., Johnson, C.J., Atkinson, L., Escobar, M., Douglas, L. & Wilson , B. (2002). Young adult academic outcomes in a longitudinal sample of speech/language impaired and control children. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43, 635-645. 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