A ‘word finding difficulty is when a person knows and understands a particular word, but has difficulty retrieving it and using it when talking.
Children who have word-finding difficulties may;
- Have a good understanding of words but a poor expressive vocabulary.
- Talk around the word or explain the word they cannot find (e.g. “You know, the thing I brush my hair with“).
- Use non-specific words such as it, thing, there, that one, stuff or over-generalise, using one word for many e.g. “top” for shirt, jumper, t-shirt, cardigan etc.
- Use general action words e.g ‘got’, go’, ‘do’ instead of specific words such as ‘make’, ‘wrap’ ‘drive’.
- Substitute words with a close meaning (for example they might say spoon instead of fork) or may use words that sound the same .
- Use obvious word searching behaviors such as using um a lot (for example “ball, book, um, um, um bike“)
- Have lots of pauses in their speech and may take a long time to answer a question.
- Rarely use ‘content’ words. For example instead of saying “I got the book from her” they may say “I got it from her“.
