A person creates a relationship with others by sharing emotions, feelings, and thoughts through language. Children with cerebral palsy usually do not speak in long sentences because they lack the ability to speak and express their opinions through spe...
A person creates a relationship with others by sharing emotions, feelings, and thoughts through language. Children with cerebral palsy usually do not speak in long sentences because they lack the ability to speak and express their opinions through speech. This is due to their limited experiences and involvement in activities in various environments. It is necessary to assist them to improve their ability of expression accurately and precisely in various communication situations so that they can communicate with others without difficulty.
Using mind map activities is a way to allow these children to continuously associate a word with another so that they acquire a broad vocabulary. In mind map activities, each individual's ability can be drastically improved by small group activities rather than solitary intervention. Therefore, the present study was focused on determining the effect of mind map activities on the improvement of the speaking ability of children with cerebral palsy.
Four cerebral palsied children were the subjects for the experiments and a before-after scheme was applied to determine the effects on his or her language competence. The controlled program is composed of a given word, the word's associated activities, the thought that accompanies the given word's expression, incubation, the chart of mind map activities, and the expression of the given word from looking at the words-associated chart.
To analyze the results, the ability to express a broad range of vocabulary, the number of total utterance, the mean length of utterance in words, and the ability to define the words were evaluated. This was done by observing the speaking occurrences during the procedure that demonstrated expressions of the given word that were obtained by the children using the word's associated chart and mind map activities.
The results of the present study were the following:
First, small group mind map activities increased the number of the associated words with the given word. When comparing the usage of different parts of speech, the noun appeared to be more prevalent than verbs before the experiments. However, after the experiment performed, the frequency of noun usage decreased, while that of verb usage increased. Also, the usage of descriptive words surfaced. This means that the subjects gave more detailed expressions about the state of humans and objects from the given word.
Second, small group mind map activities increased the number of total utterance from the subjects.
Third, small group mind map activities increased the mean length of utterance in words of the subjects.
Fourth, small group mind map activities increased the subjects' ability to define words.
These results suggest that small group map activities have a positive effect on the language competence of children with cerebral palsy. However, the present study had an insufficient number of subjects and an insufficient amount of research period to generalize clear results.