Semantics

School level: 5 to 8 years old.

For speech therapists, graphic material has been an important element in their work and a support for the linguistic interactions they establish with children. They allow a more effective control of the contingencies of communication, a concrete manipulation of representations of reality and an intermediate step between the referent and the word.

Together with the concrete material of toys and real objects, drawings serve to allow a clearer, more stable and better adjusted stimulation of certain verbal contents, when these are not naturally acquired by the child, sometimes because the usual communication situations may be excessively chaotic or confusing for some children, sometimes because specific conditions (sensory or cognitive impairment…) have significantly modified the normal acquisition processes.

Verbs are a category that is often difficult to represent through drawings, which is why 720 images are presented here, covering more or less the main verb group. In this way, the speech therapist can have at his disposal simple and attractive representations to reinforce his stimulation work.

This material does not contain any methodological element per se, not even a progression of increasing difficulty, since we do not have sufficiently precise data in Spanish on the order of appearance of these verbs in the children’s lexicon, although we do have research that allows us to affirm that these 720 verbs are known by the child before the age of 6. It is simply intended to be a resource available to speech therapists to visualize certain words and to give the child the possibility of manipulating the drawings in relation to their linguistic correspondences.

The material is completed by a didactic guide with suggestions for its use in comprehension, lexical structure and expression. In addition, there are illustrations with the grapheme to be matched with the drawings.