Glossary
These terms may sometimes be used by health and educational professionals working with children with Additional Learning Needs.This is not an exhaustive list.
Amanuensis - A scribe or writer for a child or adult who has difficulty writing or recording.
Apraxia - The lack of praxis or motor planning. Interference with planning and executing an unfamiliar task.The lack of praxis or motor planning. Interference with planning and executing an unfamiliar task
Articulation - The production of vowels and consonants by the active and passive articulators in the mouth. The active articulators are the moving parts of the mouth -the lips, tongue and soft palate- which can produce sounds, while the passive articulators are the non-moving parts - the hard palate and the teeth - against which, in the production of many sounds, the active articulators come into contact.
Asymmetry - Where one side of the body is different from the other, i.e. one side shorter or more flexed than the other.
Auditory - Pertaining to hearing.
Auditory Sequential Memory - The ability to hold sequences of sounds, words or sentences in the memory for long enough to be able to gain information from them, process it and respond to it.
Auditory Discrimination - The ability to recognise differences in phonemes [see below]. This includes the ability to identify words and sounds that are similar and those that are different.
Auditory Perceptual Difficulties - Trouble taking information through the sense of hearing and/or processing that information. The child may hear inaccurately.
Balance Problem - The ability to stay in and regain a position such as standing and sitting.
BECTS or BECCTS Syndrome - Benign rolandic epilepsy is an epilepsy syndrome. It is also known as benign rolandic epilepsy of childhood (BREC) or benign epilepsy with centro-temporal spikes (BECTS). Benign rolandic epilepsy is called 'benign' because it has a good outcome - nearly all children with it will outgrow it during puberty.
Body Awareness - The consciousness of oneself physically moving through space.
Body Image - The visual knowledge of oneself.
Body Percept - A person's perception of his own body, it consists of sensory pictures or ‘maps’ of the body stored in the brain. It may also be called the body scheme or body image.
Body Scheme - The sensory knowledge of oneself.
Beery Test - A test of visual motor integration.
Central Programming - Neural functions that are innate in the central nervous system; they do not have to be learned. Crawling on hands and knees, and walking, are examples of centrally programmed actions.
Cerebral Palsy - Permanent, but not unchanging, disorder of posture and movement resulting from brain damage.
Cluttering - Rapid and muddled speech.
Co-contraction - The simultaneous contraction of all the muscles around a joint to stabilise it.
Co-ordination - Muscles moving together to achieve smooth, efficient movements.
Core Stability - Describes the ability to control the position and movement of the central portion of the body. Core stability training targets the muscles deep within the abdomen which connect to the spine, pelvis and shoulders, which assist in the maintenance of good posture and provide the foundation for all arm and leg movements.
Development - The process of growth of all limbs, body functions, and physical, emotional and intellectual facilities.
Directional Awareness - The ability to move in different directions such as forwards, backwards, sideways and diagonally.
Dominance - This relates to the side that the child uses to carry out activities that require just one side to be used such as writing, kicking a ball, looking through a tube.
Developmental Co-ordination Disorder - A developmental disorder usually recognised in childhood where the child has difficulties with co-ordination affecting him or her at home and school. The child may have difficulties with activities such as handwriting, bottom wiping ,dressing, playing ball games. Some children continue to have difficulties into teens and adulthood. It can overlap with other difficulties such as ADHD and Dyslexia. The term Dyspraxia is sometimes used interchangeably.
Distractible - Difficulty in staying on a particular task.
Dysarthria - The articulation of language leading to slurred speech.
Dyscalculia - A problem understanding numbers and mathematical concepts.
Dysgraphia - Poor handwriting or the inability to perform the motor movements required for handwriting.
Dyslexia - Difficulty in reading or learning to read.
Dyspraxia - Poor praxis or motor planning is the exact definition. However it is sometimes a term used to describe a child with co-ordination difficulties and may be used interchangeably with the term DCD or Developmental Co-ordination Disorder especially in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand.
Encopresis - Soiling of faeces.
Enuresis - Bed wetting
Equilibrium - The combination of body movements or shifts in weight required to maintain or regain balance.
Executive Functioning- This is where there is high demand on the individual- such as being organised to do a task, time management, selection and prioritisation, emotional regulation, selective and sustained attention
Expressive Language - Communication by means of the spoken word. Also - the ability to produce spoken language that is grammatically and syntactically sound and coherent.
Extension - The action of straightening back, neck, arms or legs.
Eye - Hand Co-ordination - The ability of the hands and eyes to work together. It is needed for writing, for example.
Fine Motor Skills - Small movements of the hands required, for example, for handwriting or using cutlery, buttoning tasks.
Finger Agnosia - The ability to recognise which finger is being touched without seeing it.
Flexion - The act of bending or pulling in a part of the body.
Floppy - Parts (or all) of the body that feel very "loose" and can be moved in a greater range than you would expect.Some professionals may use the term "hypotonic" to mean the same thing
Grapheme - This is the fundamental unit in written language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.
Gross Motor - Large movements e.g. kicking and catching a ball, running.
Higher Level Language - The ability to process, integrate, interpret and organise verbal/written language.
IEP - Individual education plan - this is usually written for each child in school to plan out what is being done and how it will be achieved.
Kinaesthesia - The ability to identify where your body is in space.
Mid Line Crossing - The act of moving a hand from one side of the body to the other, for example as is required for handwriting.
Minimal Crossing - The ability of your hand to cross from one side of the body to the other.
Minimal Brain Dysfunction - A mild or minimal neurological abnormality that causes learning difficulties in the child with near average intelligence.This is a term that used to be used but has gone out of favour by most professionals.
Motor planning - The act of conceiving, organising and carrying out a sequence of unfamiliar actions – it is also known as praxis.
Occupational Therapy - The management of activities of daily living and educational skills.- in young children this could be to do with play- the occupation of children.
Optometrist - The person who tests vision and prescribes glasses.
Oral Peripheral Examination - An examination of the passive and active oral structures (see above) to ascertain whether there is any abnormality and whether any breakdown in the accuracy, speed, sequencing, or co-ordination of movement could be contributing to reduced speech intelligibility and/or exacerbating feeding patterns.
Orthoptist - A person who specialises in the movement of the eyes and children's visual problems.
Pelvic Stability - The cumulative effect of joint laxity and muscle strength in and around the hips.
Perception - The meaning the brain gives to sensory input. Perception is subjective, in contrast to sensation, which is objective.
Perceptual Constancy - The ability to perceive an object as possessing certain properties such as shape, position and size in spite of the different ways it may be presented.
Phoneme - A speech sound.
Phonological Awareness - The understanding that language is made up of individual sounds which are put together to form the words that we speak and write. It is the ability to identify numbers of syllables and repeat multi-syllabic words to detect/generate rhymes, to blend and segment words into their component syllables and sounds. These skills are pre-requisite skills for developing reading, writing and spelling.
Physiotherapy - Management of movement disorders.
Posture - A position from which a child starts moving, any movement when it stops.
Prone - The body position with the face and stomach downward.
Pragmatics - The social use of language - this can the interpretation of non verbal gestures such as seeing someone waving or smiling and guessing what they mean, understanding the meaning of idioms (such as pull up your socks) and being able to not take them literally.
Proprioception - From the Latin word "one's own". The sensations from the muscles and joints. Proprioceptive input tells the brain when and how the joints are bending, extending or being pulled and compressed. This information enables the brain to know where each part of the body is and how it is moving.
Receptive Language - The ability to understand language.
Reflexes - Responses to certain stimuli, and which are always the same e.g. turning the head to the left causing extension of limbs on that side, and flexion of limbs on the other side.
Refractive Error - The lens power required producing a perfectly focused image on the retina.
Semantic - The meaning of words impulses flowing from the sense receptors in the body to the spinal cord and brain.
Sensory Integration - A process that describes the ability to organise sensory information for use.
Sequencing - The ability to master individual steps of an activity and pass from one component part to the next in the correct order. This can be seeing a sequence and following it- such as copying words off the board or hearing an instruction (auditory).
Shoulder Stability - This relates to the muscle strength and joint laxity of the shoulders.
Skill - The efficiency of carrying out a task.
Spatial Awareness - The ability to judge distances and direction in relation to other objects (i.e. moving around objects in a room and not knocking into them).
Spatial Orientation - Knowledge of space, the distance between self and objects in the environment.
Speech and Language Therapy - The management of eating, drinking, speech and language and communication difficulties.
Stereognosis - The ability to perceive and understand shape, size and texture of objects by the sense of touch alone.
Supine - Horizontal position with face and stomach upward.
Symmetrical Integration - The ability to move both sides of the body simultaneously in identical patterns of movement e.g. jumping forward with both feet together 10 times in a row.
Tactile Defensiveness - A sensory integrative dysfunction in which tactile sensations cause excessive emotional reactions, hyperactivity or other behavioural problems.
Tone - Firmness of the muscles.
Vestibular System - The sensory system that responds to the position of the head in relation to gravity, and to decelerated or accelerated movement.
Visual - Pertaining to sight.
Visual Closure - The ability to recognise an object when presented with it in an incomplete form.
Visual Discrimination - The ability to perceive similarities and differences in characteristics, and in the arrangement, sequence and organisation, of visual stimuli.
Visual Figure Ground - The ability to differentiate stimulus from its background or the ability to attend to one stimulus without being distracted by irrelevant visual stimulus.
Visual Memory - The ability to recall characteristics of purely visual stimuli.
Visual Motor Integration - The integration of visual motor information which enables eye-hand co-ordination.
Visual Perception - Judging depth, visual closure, visual discrimination and visual figure ground i.e. difficulty processing information, seeing the difference between two objects, trouble seeing how far and near objects might be.
Visual Spatial Relationships - The ability to sense the relationship of objects to each other and oneself.
Word Finding Difficulties - Having difficulty thinking of the word one wants to say quickly and accurately, even though one knows it. It can interrupt attempts at conversation and is frustrating for the speaker and the listener.