“Attualità della ritmica corporea nelle patologie della comunicazione e del linguaggio”

The Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm promotes the maturation of the language by the education of the rhythmical movements. The language develops more easily starting from the perceptive and motor skills of the first developmental steps by playing movements. According to the Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm, some movements are able to help the perception of sound, rhythm and pitch and the correct production of the language parameters: tension, intensity and duration. The main habilitation/rehabilitation activities are: walking at the aim of checking the room “took up”, the direction (forward, back, on the right, on the left) and the time (quick or slow); playing the several walking and motor rhythms; the knowledge of the body structure; the global and local relaxation; trying the quality of the movement (tension, duration and direction); playing auditory rhythms; playing with vowels; playing with syllables. In particular the child is asked to play some body movements, which are called “the best” because their tension, duration, intensity and direction accord with the language sounds, that is to say with “micro-movements” of the phono-articulatory organs. The present work has the aim of analysing the levels on which the Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm is able to obtain the best results, finding the targets in the different language pathologies and in the several age ranges, and pointing out the relationships with other Verbo-Tonal Procedures and with other methodologies within the ambit of the Rehabilitation Programm. At sensorial-perceptive level the Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm proposes activities suitable to stimulate the auditory perception by games of auditory-motor co-ordination. As far as the language development is concerned the Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm proposes “walking games”, “relaxation games”, vowels stimulation with the highest emphasis on the emotional content and phonemas stimulation. According with the phonetic-phonological progression the child is stimulated to produce the words, that he/she has already known in the listening comprehension games. Simple sentences are immeditely constructed using the words that the child is able to say: the content of the sentences must be playful, contextual and meaningful for the child. In conclusion the Verbo-Tonal Body Rhythm has the aim of using the movements to help the body perception and the phono-articulatory activities, which are necessary for the production of syllables, words and sentences. The integration of the Body Rhythm activities with other Verbo-Tonal Procedures and other rehabilitation methods is the condition to reach the aims requested by the clinical diagnosis and the individual communicative profile.