Multiple Meaning Words And Children With Hearing Loss

🐸 Toad or Towed?

Homophones are words that sound the same as a toad 🐸 and towed 🛻-🚗 but are spelled differently and have different meanings. There are over 7700 homophones in the English language and many puns, jokes, and cartoons are based on homophones.

🐸 Children with limited vocabularies often struggle to understand and use multiple-meaning words. This negatively impacts their listening and reading comprehension.

🐸 Do you talk about contextually-based vocabulary and metacognitive skills with kids with hearing loss?

In LSL auditory verbal therapy, I offer tips and strategies for parents to help their children understand jokes and why they are funny. This expands the children’s vocabulary and grows flexible language skills like multiple-meaning words, idioms, puns. Memorizing jokes grow auditory memory skills, encourages clear speech when retelling, and builds perspective-taking and social skills.

Make Little Joke Books To Grow Listening and Spoken Language

One of my LSL auditory verbal families downloaded the June Riddles & Jokes that I sent during a teletherapy session. All month the 5-year-old Little Listener and his parents practiced understanding and telling the jokes. They cut out the individual jokes and added them one by one to a little book once mastered.

The Little Listener was thrilled to share their book and the parents sent these two photos to me. I had to pass along this brilliant and super easy idea! 😀 This family knows that helping their child understand the jokes and why they are funny expands her vocabulary and grows flexible language skills like multiple-meaning words, idioms, puns. Memorizing jokes grow auditory memory skills, encourages clear speech when retelling, and builds perspective-taking and social skills.

For more information check out the post - Encouraging A Sense Of Humor - Joke Of The Week

Did I mention there is a full year of FREE Riddles & Jokes to grow your child’s listening and spoken language skills?

Free Riddles and Jokes To Grow Listening and Language Learning!

Encouraging A Sense of Humor - Joke of the Week

A child’s ability to understand humor is evidence of growing listening, spoken language, and social skills. Many children who are deaf and hard of hearing are concrete thinkers and lack linguistic flexibility which has a negative impact on literacy, academic and social success. Research offers evidence of the value of understanding humor as a key element in developing higher-level language skills and complex language patterns such as inferences, multiple-meaning words, and idioms which are often weak for children with hearing loss without intervention.

Understanding jokes and why they are funny builds vocabulary, figurative language, and knowledge of structural and lexical ambiguity. Learning to tell jokes encourages clear speech, appropriate prosody as well as perspective-taking and social skills. Memorizing jokes to tell improves auditory memory skills.

Talk about different kinds of jokes. Jokes that ask a question with a “punch line” that makes people laugh. Knock - Knock jokes have two parts and are usually funny because one word sounds similar or rhymes with a different word. Ask a child to explain why a joke is funny. If not many bluff and laugh without understanding.

When learning how to reply and tell jokes a script is helpful.  “I have a joke for you.” introduces the topic of conversation.  Explaining that jokes are not logical and the answers are tricky is important. Teaching the child to respond with “I don’t know. I give up.” works well.

Child: I have a joke for you.
Adult: Ok. I’m ready.
Child: What is a dog’s favorite snack?
Adult: I don’t know. I give up.
Child: Pup-corn! LOL!

In my auditory verbal practice, children often age 5-7 come prepared with a joke to share. They draw a picture of the joke on one side of a piece of paper and the answer goes on the back often written by a parent.

Monthly and seasonal Riddles & Jokes are available for FREE in my Listen With Lynn shop. Share them in teletherapy, distance-learning or send home for fun and practice. They can be printed cut out and adhered to index cards for easy re-telling.