W

A child who, as determined by the state where the child resides, is:

• A foster child.
• A ward of the state.
• In the custody of a public child welfare agency.

Weak Syllable Deletion is a phonological process (phonological pattern) in which the weakly stressed syllables in words are omitted; for example, ‘effant’ for ‘elephant’, ‘stake’ for ‘mistake’ and ‘member’ for ‘remember’.

The term ‘within normal limits’, always abbreviated WNL, is used to indicate that no abnormal results were found during the testing of an individual child or adult. Another way of saying WNL in children is to report that a child’s performance when tested was ‘age appropriate’ or that the child’s results ‘fell within typical age expectations’.

Word attack is an aspect of reading instruction that includes intentional strategies for learning to decode, sight read, and recognize written words.

Word finding refers to the ability to retrieve words. This can be most easily explained by the ‘tip if your tongue’ phenomenon, when you know the word but you simply cannot retrieve it.

The speaker avoids saying certain words or sounds because of previous repeated difficulty with those particular words or sounds. The speaker avoids speaking with certain people or in certain situations based on previous difficulty with fluency in these situations.

Use of a synonym to avoid or in anticipation of a block. For example:

• Saying “pretty” when you really wanted to say “beautiful”.

The brain’s capacity to hold information active until we need to use it for some purpose. The ability to store and manage information in one’s mind for a short period of time. In one test of working memory a person listens to random numbers and then repeats them. The average adult can hold 7 numbers in their working memory. Working memory is sometimes called Short-term memory.