Blog 3

I was lucky enough to have a visit from my friend the other night. He brought over his 3 year old kiddo who just was a world for fun for me to watch. I finally got to see tons of things from our developmental class right in front of my eyes. I think sometimes we take these normal instances of development for granted and just go on with life, until we are prompted to recall them.
My cats were just a source of wonderment to him. He repeatedly attempted to case them around the house. He used multiple forms of overgeneralization when discussing my cats with me. He would say things like “the white cat has orange feets” or the “white cat runned slower than the grey cat”. (The “white cat” was a source of entertainment as the kiddo was able to actually catch him.) My friends kiddo has pretty good language for his age, but still struggles with irregular verbs and will overgeneralize them. I think we, as adults, often use these moments as functional teaching moments and then move on with life.
When I first was introduced to overgeneralization I only thought of it in the world of Autism as a taught word that then is applied to everything. I have often seen children who would overgeneralize “more” due the word often getting them an increased access to multiple reinforcers. We see this as a problem when a child walks up to you and says “more”, but it unable to tell you what he wants. One of the ways we would use for treatment would be to only teach the child to mand for items and not with the overgeneralized word to promote communication.