This happens to almost all of us: we want to say a word, but it "escapes" us, we get stuck in the middle of a sentence, or we use many filler words like "like," "um," "you know." This phenomenon is called retrieval difficulties, and it can happen at any age. To understand why this happens, we can liken the brain to a grocery store.
Words are the products, and the store owner, the language center, is responsible for supplying them to the customer on demand. When the store owner needs to retrieve a product from the inventory, it means that the product definitely exists, and the task is to find and extract it. If the product is missing, it cannot be retrieved simply because it does not exist.
Yana Waxman, a speech therapist at the Child Development Institute and the Hearing Institute at Meir Medical Center, explains the problem: 3 View gallery When words escape us ( Photo: Shutterstock ) When we talk about word retrieval, the vocabulary is established, and the difficulty lies in retrieving from it a word that is definitely known and familiar. When the vocabulary is not yet established and is in the process of acquisition, it is not a retrieval difficulty but a lack of vocabulary. How do retrieval difficulties manifest in children? The term "retrieval difficulties" is not used before the age of four, which is the average age at which the basic lexicon is acquired and internalized (of course, in accordance with the individual pace of language acquisition of each child).
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