Motor learning and communication

Consider the discussion on motor planning, motor control, and motor learning – describe: The type of practice (ie: random or blocked) and the type of tasks (continuous or discrete) that may be used to promote verbal communication skills in children during social activity.

Motor Learning in Autism is approached from many different angles in past and what is becoming more evident through the literature is that children with Autism have peculiar learning needs, in this realm.

One of the considerations in motor learning in terms of practicing verbal communication is type of feedback provided. For example, adding action, tactile, visual: multi-sensory feedback would help. In practicing “CLOSE” as the word, closing a book with hand over hand action while saying “close” would help. 

Also, using random, massed as well as distributed trials is more effective. Instead of just practicing “CLOSE”, over and over, this would mean practicing other words and bringing in “CLOSE” every few times, not in a pattern. Such as 1:“Open and close”, perform book open and close act. 2:“Go and close”, go to door and close door, 3:“stand and close”, stand and close window. And so on.

Provide 2 treatment activities and how you would apply principles of task and practice to promote motor learning to help the child develop social skills with improved communicative understanding of others and expressed self-intent.

Treatment activity 1: Choosing a re-inforcer: Motivating task can be different for every child, it may be going out in sun, or playing with putty. One of my pre-school students loved holding a small flag in his hand, and I used it to get much done, he had to work to get the flag, this involved (through speech cotx) saying “FLAG”, “WANT”, and for me it was finding the flag from under the bean bags, for great sensory input!. Either way, communicative understanding was established eventually, and as soon as the kid walked into OT room, he expressed “AAG”, while jumping into the bean bag!

Treatment activity 2: Increasing cognitive/linguistic demand:

Same child was given PECS book, progressed to sentence level speech, later on, and by now had to identify the flag from multiple items very similar color combinations from a box, and at times had to choose other items such as “give me box, give me flag, give me pencil………..so now the treatment involved saying the same word with more cognitive effort and linguistic load.