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19 May 2026

At a loss for a word?

By Gretchen Durham – Speech-Language Therapist at Bellavista School

At a loss for a word? Exploring word finding difficulties and how to help.

 

May is Better Speech & Language Month – an opportunity to bring more visibility to the communication challenges that don’t always get talked about. Word finding difficulty is one of them.

We’ve all experienced searching for a word mid conversation and finding ourselves at a complete loss. ‘Pass me that black thing, with all the buttons on it, to change the channel’. It's usually a common item you can picture in your mind, but the name just escapes you. This is an example of a word-finding struggle; difficulty accessing and retrieving a word from memory, despite knowing it and having used it previously.

Word finding difficulties are common amongst children with developmental language disorder as well as adults with acquired language disorders. However, all of us experience these difficulties, especially when we are tired, stressed, anxious or simply as we age.

A child with word finding difficulties will have difficulty adequately expressing their knowledge and complex thoughts. They will appear to not know answers to questions that require retrieval of specific details or facts. They will experience difficulties with visual confrontational naming and during conversational discourse. These difficulties can be highly frustrating and negatively impact a child’s learning success, willingness to communicate and self-esteem.

Word finding difficulties are characterised by hesitations, false starts, fillers such as ‘uhm’, word repetitions and revisions, circumlocutions (going around or describing the word) and delayed response times as they try to access the word from memory. Because accessing proper nouns from verbal working memory is more demanding than retrieving high-frequency, general nouns such as “thing” or “stuff,” individuals with word-finding difficulties often rely on nonspecific language and category substitutions e.g., vet for doctor.

Words are stored in the semantic (vocabulary) system. An organised semantic system includes well identified semantic features of words allowing for their easy recall and retrieval. Children with language learning difficulties fail to create adequate semantic representations for words, instead they create simple semantic networks with limited associations to the target word, resulting in difficulties accessing and retrieving words.

Word-finding interventions focus on strengthening word classification, categorisation and semantic networking to build multiple connections and associations to words. Stronger connections support more efficient encoding of vocabulary and improve the accuracy, speed, and ease of word retrieval.

 

Practical strategies to support children with word finding difficulties in the moment

Phonemic cueing; giving the sound the target word starts with: /p/ for ‘pram’. Phonetic placement cues show your child the position of the articulators for the beginning sound. You can provide word fragments or syllable cues from the target word, such as “ele…” for elephant, to help trigger retrieval. Rhyming cues can also be helpful, such as “it sounds like cat” for hat.

Semantic cueing draws on the word's meaning. Prompts relate to the target word’s category or function: ‘It’s clothing that we wear for swimming’ (costume). Sentence closure works similarly. Start with open sets where a wide range of words satisfy the response; ‘cars are ________’, then move to more constrained sets such as ‘I brush my teeth with a ________’.

Synonyms also prompt word retrieval: ‘Tell me another word for big?’ So can opposites; ‘Hot and? Not clean, but?’ as does cueing using expected and familiar patterns; ‘salt and (pepper)’ or ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…’.

Ways to support semantic development for more efficient word retrieval over time

Sorting tasks are a good place to begin; land versus water transport, or wild versus farm animals. Word classification games take a similar approach: ‘How many boys’ names can you think of?’ Convergent naming asks your child to identify the category an item belongs to ‘Banana, apple and grape are…? Are they fruits or vegetables?’, while divergent naming reverses the question: ‘Give me as many winter clothes as you can think of.’ Identifying  the odd one out is another easy option: car, bus, brush, boat.

Compare and contrast activities target similarities and differences ‘What’s the same about a bracelet and a necklace?’ Play guessing games that encourage your child to describe objects: where do you find it, what you would use it for, what does it look like. Give a word definition and let your child guess the item, as in ‘I spy with my little eye’.

Word associations help build the connections that make recall easier. A pilot goes with a…? What are all the things you see at the airport? Free associations let your child move through a chain like water > swim > towel > bath > soap > clean > dishes. Controlled associations work well as a game: play ‘I went to the market and I bought…’

Semantic absurdities take a different angle: children love to correct you when you say something absurd and silly like ‘I clean the pool with a broom’.

Visualisation can be encouraged by prompting the child to form mental images of target words, helping them compensate for verbal-symbolic difficulties. Mind maps are also useful visual tools for representing word associations and semantic connections.

A Speech-Language Therapist can help your child with their word finding difficulties. For more information, visit www.bellavista.org.za.

Reference

Bowen, C (1998) Information for Families: Helping Children Who have Word Retrieval Difficulties.