Speech and Language Program

Adaptive Software To Help Learning

While most children are able to develop language and learning skills naturally, through daily interaction with parents and peers, some need extra stimulation. This is how our language software helps -- it provides the equivalent of millions of spoken words in a just a few weeks of intense exercise that adapts to each student.

The Processing Challenge
Speech and language problems are almost always caused by language processing problems, sometimes called auditory processing disorder or APD. There is a muddiness to how they hear language, sometimes described as like hearing sound through water. Children with a history of speech and language delays are at risk learners and at risk readers, even if their language issues resolve.

For the first few years of life, all learning is auditory. Language difficulties indicate processing issues that impact learning -- memory, focus, listening, reading, logic and reasoning. Even though early speech issues often resolve, many children carry the auditory processing glitch through their lives, undermining learning and reading. Therefore, addressing these processing difficulties early is crucially important.
Speech and language milestones

How Gemm Learning Helps Language Skills

Our language program, Fast ForWord, treats the underlying auditory processing difficulty, rather than tutoring or providing therapy for the language symptoms.

The research based software builds accurate listening, the primary source of most speech and language difficulties. It also builds processing efficiency, so that a child has the capacity to think while listening, an essential aspect of learning (observing) how language is structured, building vocabulary and developing higher level thinking and reasoning skills. These changes not only improve language, they also build a foundation for learning and reading proficiency.

The Exercises
In the speech-sound drills, Fast ForWord starts off with processed sounds that preserve the frequency content of normal speech sounds, but are slowed down, making it easier for children with slower than normal temporal processing to discriminate between sounds, syllables and words. As your child progresses, the sounds speed up, leading your child towards mastery at natural language speed in tiny incremental steps.

Language Skills Addressed
While the primary source of language difficulties is processing speed that affects the ability to hear words clearly, a history of inaccurate listening leads to other issues:

• Working Memory. If the language input is muddy, children do not get to practice taking in and holding information, leading to a delay in working memory development.


• Attention. If language processing is impaired -- if a teacher or parent is talking at 50 miles an hour, and a child is listening at 45 miles an hour -- chunks of words are missed or misheard, listening is exhausting and the content is uninteresting. Consequently, a child with language difficulties may not learn to stay engage while listening. They grow accustomed to tuning out.


• Sequencing. Children who listen inefficiently, do not have mind capacity to recognize patterns or to manipulate words or thoughts. This impacts sequencing -- of letters in words, words in sentences, of events, etc.


• Vocabulary and Language Structure. Many children needing speech therapy have delayed vocabularies, mainly because they do not process words clearly enough to be willing to use them in speech or recognize them in text.

Fast ForWord is a series of exercises that assumes these difficulties will exist in children and adults with speech and language difficulties, and so working memory, attention and sequencing are targeted along with processing.

Language Gains from Our Program

Mastery of these skills helps children with a speech and language delay develop enhanced phonological awareness, which helps all language functioning -- following directions, vocabulary, pronunciation, conversation, retention, engaged listening, listening comprehension -- and reading.

Elementary Age Children
For young children, parents report sharp improvements in conversation skills -- talkativeness -- and vocabulary after only a few weeks. They also report an improved ability to follow directions at home and in class. Fast ForWord has also had great success in helping speech delays from autism.

Middle & High School
For older children, improved language processing helps them absorb the subtleties of language and vocabulary, so important for college entrance tests. Since language is the operating system of the brain, improvements in how your child hears and processes language, i.e., a more efficient operating system, leads to gains in higher level thinking and reasoning skills, and a wide range of learning and reading skills. This is why parents report gains in confidence, homework independence and better grades in addition to reading gains.