Venker & Lorang (2024)
As of this writing (July 17, 2025), I am aware of five peer-reviewed publications critiquing Gestalt Language Processing and Natural Language Acquisition. Of those five, three of them have received the most attention: Hutchins et al. (2024), Beals (2024), and Bryant et al. (2024).
While I think that those three articles all make valuable contributions, albeit with varying approaches to audience design, I want to draw your attention to what I think is the clearest (and shortest) critical analysis of Gestalt Language Processing (the authors refer to it as Gestalt Language Processing).
In a four-page letter to the editor, Courtney Venker and Emily Lorang affirm their commitment to neurodiversity, stating that they “wholeheartedly agree that valuing autistic communication, including echolalia, is a fundamental neurodiversity-affirmative practice.” They identify ways that Gestalt Language Processing/Development and Natural Language Acquisition go beyond valuing echolalia, to make additional claims that are not supported by the evidence. I’ll add that we don’t need evidence to decide to value echolalia, as that is a decision we make based on our values. Claims about how brains work, or how children learn grammar, on the other hand, do require systematic evidence to back them up.
Venker and Lorang go on to describe five issues that are important to discussions about NLA/GLP:
Lack of empirical evidence for GLP
Spoken language samples are not adequate to study language processing
Need for increased conceptual clarity: what exactly do we mean when we say GLP?
Messages about GLP may underestimate what autistic children understand
Some clinical strategies in NLA lack support and contradict evidence-aligned practices
This article is an important reminder that embracing neurodiversity does not require us to adopt a particular belief about linguistics, or a particular set of therapeutic practices. I highly recommend that anyone interested in learning more about GLP and NLA read this editorial. Once you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comments!
Read it here for free: Continuing the conversation about echolalia and Gestalt Language Development
