Receptive and Expressive Language
Receptive and expressive language is a fancy way of saying listening and talking.
If your child has trouble understanding complicated verbal instructions or communicating effectively, he or she may have been diagnosed with a receptive and/or expressive language problem.
And, yet—you guessed it—the problem may in fact be visual.
Visual Skills and Communication
Poorly developed eye movement skills and lack of visual dominance (relying on less efficient sensory systems in lieu of our visual system) create real language problems.
Here’s why: Those of us with strong visual thinking skills are able to translate what we hear into mental imagery. If you tell us about a red suitcase, we develop a picture of a red suitcase in our minds. We store that information and can retrieve it later, when we need it.
For example:
“Junior, I need you to get the red suitcase from the basement.”
If Junior has strong visual thinking skills, Junior hears what you’ve said and his brain creates an image of the red suitcase, and of its location in the basement, and he can translate that into action.
If, instead, Junior has poorly developed visual thinking skills, instead of creating an image in his mind of what he has been told to do, he will instead rely on a less efficient sensory system—perhaps attempting to remember the spoken words in sequence.
Since he’s relying on spoken word memory instead of a picture in his mind, he might struggle with retrieving the information. “Where did Mom say the suitcase was? And did she say the red suitcase or the black suitcase?”
When Junior comes up empty-handed, his actions might be chalked up to willful inattention, disobedience, or even ADHD or dyslexia, when, in fact, he simply couldn’t process the information visually.
For example:
“Junior, I need you to get the red suitcase from the basement.”
If Junior has strong visual thinking skills, Junior hears what you’ve said and his brain creates an image of the red suitcase, and of its location in the basement, and he can translate that into action.
If, instead, Junior has poorly developed visual thinking skills, instead of creating an image in his mind of what he has been told to do, he will instead rely on a less efficient sensory system—perhaps attempting to remember the spoken words in sequence.
Since he’s relying on spoken word memory instead of a picture in his mind, he might struggle with retrieving the information. “Where did Mom say the suitcase was? And did she say the red suitcase or the black suitcase?”
When Junior comes up empty-handed, his actions might be chalked up to willful inattention, disobedience, or even ADHD or dyslexia, when, in fact, he simply couldn’t process the information visually.
It’s All About the Brain
Children with receptive/expressive language problems often don’t convert information that they hear into imagery because they are too busy trying to remember all of the words that they heard. Brain studies show less activity in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (which is associated with mental imagery) when a child is trying to remember spoken words rather than visualizing what has been said and understanding it.
By retraining our brain to develop functional vision skills, we can shift to a more efficient sensory system and completely change the way we process information.
What Visual Learning skill do you want to learn about?
