GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: pooka on March 03, 2015, 06:20:28 AM
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Cedar, who most of you know has ASD, will be four this month, and still doesn't really talk. He counts, and based on his play with number cut-outs he can order number symbols. The other day he read the time off a digital clock, though with 3, 6 not 36. And the other day he repeated "[Cedar], get down" when we told him to get off a coffee table.
He names colors too. It's funny because there's a little girl who is a year ahead of him at church, who was a prodigious talker in nursery, but her mom posted on facebook that she doesn't know her colors. So you just never know with kids.
Something I ran across the other day was that Hekka had a 4 word rotating vocab at this age. Cedars is more like 2 words, but I'd forgotten Hekka doing anything like that.
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Yesterday I realized why Cedar says "six" with two syllables. He's epenthesizing the /ks/. Though he doesn't say it clearly enough that it was obvious that was the case. My oldest did some weird syllabification too.
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So you just never know with kids.
It's like Winnie the Pooh says, "You never can tell with bees"
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So far, my bebito's words are: Christmas tree ("isssss") - he forgot this one; trash, which is an untranscribable raspberry and which he uses with gusto all the time to identify any and all trash receptacles; shoes ("issshhh"); and the occasional Papi ("bop"), who is apparently the only person in the house worthy of a name. He's unsure yet as to whether I'm Mama, or whether Mama is the person you name when you point to yourself.
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How many months old now?
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I'm pretty sure all of my boys said "mama" quite a bit after "dada." I have wondered before if I'm almost taken for granted, not different enough from themselves to be worthy of mention.
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How many months old now?
15
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Sputnik was my only kid to do any talking that young. He could talk pretty well before he got around to walking.
Something The Autistic Brain mentioned is that Temple Grandin couldn't make out voiceless stops when she was little. I've been thinking about that a lot and realized that all the easy to make sounds are hard to hear, and vice versa. Mama, for instance, requires nasalization as well as oral articulation. And looking at someone, it's the same lip movements as baba.
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My undiagnosed but very probably autistic brother in law didn't talk past a few single words until he was about 6. And now that he's an adult, he speaks very fluently and articulately and uses really complex vocabulary but it all sounds very stilted. My husband explains it as "talking like an LDS conference talk and not like a 25-year-old kid."
I don't know enough about autistic language development to know if that's something typical. Was his learning to speak more a matter of imitating entire phrases and sentences than constructing his own syntax? The other odd thing is that even they grew up bilingual, with his parents and extended family speaking to him almost all in Spanish, he is the one sibling who can't really speak Spanish convincingly. He understands it at a basic level, but has a super English-sounding accent when he uses the few phrases he does know.
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The pyschologist who diagnosed Cedar felt there were at least 3 varieties of Autism (the first time I talked to him, before he was obligated to stick to the DSM5) which might correlate with Temple Grandin's 3 types: Fact-word, Picture connectors, and picture pattern thinkers. (I might be all three and a couple others). The 3 types we discussed (when he found out I was a linguist) had to do with age of catching up: preschool, first grade, and 5th grade. Which is interesting to consider relative to Piaget's stages.
Cedar is starting to repeat more things from videos. I bet he said 12 different utterances from Bolt yesterday, and he just tried to do the opening call from the Lion King.
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Here's something I wrote previously about it:
I looked it up and it appears the person I was assisting worked in autosegmental phonology, even though there was reference to The Sound Pattern of English.
Here's an interesting bit, to me dealing with a language delayed child:
Quote
1. the features or feature-complexes which are independent in child-speech should be precisely those which may be autosegmental in adult grammar;
2. The process of language acquisition includes a task of "deautosegmentalization" or to use a less awkward term, restructuring of phonetics into linear segments....
http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/AimsAutosegmental.pdf pg 215 (This isn't the person I assisted, this is someone else's paper but recruits many references that are familiar to me.)
This is interesting because children with the syndrome formerly known as Asperger's seem to adopt an expanded tier of interpretation. It appears they process language on the phrase or sentence level rather than the word level, evidenced by a burst of language around age 3, sometimes talking in full sentences all at once. The tendency to repeat entire phrases (often from books or TV) persists, and the difficulty in analyzing intention could also support this idea.
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My son, who was much later diagnosed with Asperger's, was a very early talker. I clearly remember him surprising the pediatrician on his 9 month visit by speaking in short sentences.
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Sputnik talked before he walked. But he was tail end of normal age for walking.
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I am starting to wonder if Cedar can hear well. He is doing more imitation. He clapped hands when Hekka did this morning, and he was just imitating the faces Mack makes in Cars (reflected on the shiny truck). He also sings something resembling "I am a child of God". He used to hum the chorus, but now he's trying to sing the whole thing, kind of emphasizing the end rhymes.
He passed the sound booth when he was 2, but more recently he wasn't responsive to the booth, and the gold standard oto acoustic emissions test doesn't seem possible without anesthesia (the child has to be quiet during the test, and he hates stuff in his ears). I guess I can ask our pediatrician about a prescription strength sedative, or if general anesthesia is a better idea. It just seems kind of extreme. It makes me feel very helpless and angry.
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That does sound very frustrating. :(
My son, who is an Aspie but had not been diagnosed at that point had his hearing tested at least 4 or 5 extra times before he was 3. I was very concerned about his hearing, because he frequently did not respond at all when I spoke to him, but he kept passing the tests. His pediatrician finally said to me, "He hears you just fine. He simply doesn't want to listen."
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He's done 3 encouraging things today. He said "Hi" back to me when he woke up, tried to sing the ABC song (again, the rhymey parts) and has copied several small words. I remembered too something Temple Grandin said about processing delays that make it hard for people with autism to distinguish voiceless stops. That could also be causing his mushmouth.
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Today Cedar was using Starfall, and he said something for every color, which was new. He said "green" pretty clearly, apple for purple, and "ra" for red, though most of the other colors didn't sound much like the modeled word. He's really trying to imitate with me or with videos, just lots of stuff, and it's very encouraging.
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Cedar said "ready, set... go" several times at the store tonight. He also called tomatoes "red" and half sang brahms lullabye with us
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B)
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Yay :)
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I realized that my little guy now uses "Elmo" to mean red. It's kind of funny. Elmo started out just being Elmo but I realized over the past couple days that he was seeing an awful lot of Elmos that weren't Elmo. This morning he woke up and came in our room and started saying "Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!" I woke up from my groggy haze enough to see him pointing at the red light that our internet router was casting on the wall.
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Generalization for the win!
Now that Cedar does a reasonable approximation of banana, his speech is a lot like a minion. Before this, he sounded a lot like a simultaneous translator for zebras and dilophosaurs. I should try and get some video before that phase is gone.
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Today, the little guy pointed at a photo of my (young, slender) sister on the fridge and said "Mama!" I was very flattered. Then, he saw a very fat lady with glasses on TV and said "Mama!"
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:D
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Cedar now "Louie Louie"s the entire Alphabet song. (That is, he doesn't really know the words, but he does the tune with some likely sounding vowels). We didn't mean for him to learn that, we're supposed to be working on functional communication. But we had a friend visit for the weekend and she sang it with him enough times for it to stick, apparently.
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There are a few songs it turns out Cedar knows once I recognize he's singing them. "Wheels on the bus", "Ring around the rosie" and "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam" and a few from signing time.
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My son, who is an Aspie but had not been diagnosed at that point had his hearing tested at least 4 or 5 extra times before he was 3. I was very concerned about his hearing, because he frequently did not respond at all when I spoke to him, but he kept passing the tests. His pediatrician finally said to me, "He hears you just fine. He simply doesn't want to listen."
Went through a similar set of tests with my younger son (now 27) -- they thought perhaps high functioning autism, but ruled it out. All his teachers said he had hearing problems. Hearing tests all passed well. (with a response similar to what your pediatrician said above). Finally a series of test showed he heard fine, but had an auditory processing disorder -- something about how the two hemispheres of the brain got the information milliseconds apart instead of simultaneously. (off-rhythm). It was interesting. But it affected sometimes how he responded to auditory stimuli.
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That is interesting.
Does it still have any significant day-to-day effects now, or has he learned compensation mechanisms?
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He had pretty much already created a lot of compensation habits by the time they figured it out (5th grade - there was lots of gnashing of teeth and testing before this was figured out). But as an adult now, I would say it no longer has any significant impact on his life. He chose an occupation that doesn't require a lot of requirement for auditory processing and regurgitation. (as school often is). As the tester said at the time, "once it gets IN [his brain] it is really IN -- he doesn't seem to forget much of anything. But getting it established in, and then getting him to also be able to coherently output the information -- that is a real struggle."
That - and I have to say him using the internet daily actually helped as well - the processing of written information (reading, etc.) and interactions via chat, etc.
The testing was done by Heartspring (http://www.heartspring.org/), which was founded on helping kids with auditory issues. Fortunately for me, it is here local.
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But as an adult now, I would say it no longer has any significant impact on his life.
That's great. Adults certainly do have choices about their environment that kids in school just don't.
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I wonder if there's a filtering component to that. One thing I think goes on with Cedar is he finds different things relevant from us.
But he is signing colors now, which is pretty exciting since it involves making some of the alphabet hand shapes. And last week I was talking to him about a toy, and said it had colors, and he named the colors in the toy accurately. I am hopeful this means he has an understanding of what a category is. I can't wait for the preschool folks to see all he's done this summer. If he'll do it, of course. If he's not comfortable in an environment (like church) he acts like he used to in January.
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Remind me to ask you sometime about my idea for an iPad app about categories for kids on the spectrum.
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Is there any chance you can put it on droid instead? I am not giving a $900 machine for my kid to whack around. That's what I bought the $79 machine for. He does a fair amount with Starfall, but I was dismayed to learn it only works with a wifi signal.
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Yeah - you can develop for both.
"You" meaning "one", meaning someone with better programming skills than me. But I will have to work with such a person anyway for any of my app ideas to materialize.
There actually is a guy I graduated with that I talked to about this; he programs apps for extra money; I have three apps designed that need a programmer. Now it's just a matter of having the time to work on things outside of work and child, which seems nigh impossible.
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Tonight, Duplo and El Guapo were playing hide and seek. Robo heard them counting over and over and quickly picked up on the game. He can't really talk much yet, but he had the intonation just right, so it sounded like he was counting. I tried to get a video, but of course as soon as the camera was rolling, he wouldn't do it. He even kind of had "un doo ee" going on with minor variation each time.
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:D
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Awwww.
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:)
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I just turned on a video which was muted for a bit, and Cedar may have read "Thank you" on the screen. Or maybe spacepook had him watch Dinosaur Train more than I was aware back when she used to watch him. Over a year ago.
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Cedar brought me a pillow when I stretched out on the couch the other day. And yesterday he pointed to show he really wanted something. Though he didn't point at what he wanted, really, just kind of used it as a gesture indicating urgency, I think.
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Spells his name. Doesn't say Mama.
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Spells his name. Doesn't say Mama.
That's really interesting. The mind is a curious thing.
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This morning he was singing along to Love me like you do. Just a little. Freaked us out, though.
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Cedar went through a cute phase of saying and signing peach. Now he's repeating things like eggs, donut and 'izza.
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That's great!
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It's like Cedar knows English about as well as I know a few foreign languages. I went through a phrasebook audio this month, and I can repeat things and understand carefully pronounced things, but when asked to produce something I kind of freeze. I've spent years in these languages but they still confound me. But maybe it's me as well. My sister says I didn't talk much until I was 5.
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Cedar's song of the week is Row, Row, Row your boat.
He is saying ice meaningfully too, which is one of his favorite things.
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New this week was repeating his sister saying "Oh, shoot!" which made us forget what was wrong and start praising him. He also repeated "poopy" and "diaper". And sometimes he says what seems to be "Bye, mom". But he usually says it several times if he's going to say it. He's getting really good at saying cheese, too.
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Yesterday Cedar identified an airplane and goldfish. He has also been singing twinkle twinkle, more the tune than recognizable words, though.
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Cedar is now saying things to get things (as opposed to repeating after models). He also repeated tiger and peacock at the zoo. Of course there were many more animals besides those that we pointed out to him but you take what you can get.
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Go Cedar! What kind of things is he asking for?
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Cheese, eggs, ice cream, pizza, cookies. He is saying hungry and careful quite often, too.
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Yay!
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This week he's been repeating more and more things, especially multiple word phrases like car cart. He says (and signs) "stop and go" which is one of the songs on Potty Time, which he's really excited about (a potty themed episode by Signing Time). And last night when I was getting him ready for bed he said "nigh nigh" several times. It feels like he's really picking up steam.
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Woohoo! Go Cedar!
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:)
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That must feel so awesome for both of you!
Robo is also just getting going with speech. Mostly things like "mih-mih" for milk or "Gam" for El Guapo, but it's cute. And he can identify some of his body parts ("belly" and "feet" are the cutest).
Watching a child learn to speak never gets old. It's a discovery every time.
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This wee we have zizzo (zero) fistbump, and today he started crying and grabbed my hand to wipe his tears which was weird but cute.
Feb 6: this week I thought he signed and said mom, so I signed and said mom, and he signed and said dada. He will do the dada part pretty reliably now. I guess another thing he's added is saying "I see you" after peekaboo. But it's more like "zz zzz zzz see you!"
Feb 12: He's saying things he sees on videos without being prompted. I suppose it bears mentioning, I put the video on so we could use our keyboards because he's occupying them to type numbers as he says them, which is great but a little counterproductive for our modern lifestyle.
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Worthy of a fresh reply: Cedar is saying "five" with some sort of bilabial consonant at the front. It's kind of an unaspirated p, but we wondered if he was going to say haaah forever. Six, I think, is also stopped being multisyllabic.
Feb 28: he signed sorry last night, which I thought was really cute. He also does hurt, but he does the whole routine from the video showing his head and stomach. I think he's probably close a 200 word vocab, which is usual for age 2 (he'll be 5 in March).
3/7: Thank you with sign. Water, milk, toast but these are just CV. There was one I forgot and then I remembered when I was backing out the car and now I've forgotten again. I really hate that I can remember what I was doing when I remembered the word but not what the word was.
3/14: signed potty and said something along those lines\
3/15 signed and said book.
The signing is interesting because he wasn't really into signing time until a couple of months ago, he found the potty time DVD in the basement and wanted to watch it, and every since then he's been pretty interested in all signing time videos. And he's started signing "my body is amazing" in church a couple of times, though you can't really make it out if you don't know what he's doing, which is perhaps fortunate. He also asks for Shee shee, which seems to be Shaun the Sheep.
3/21 Soda. I guess that settles what our family calls that.
4/4 help, bear (including signs) and count.
4/9 popcorn (just saying, but very cute). He was naming a lot of letters last night, previous I'd only seen him reliable with is own name. Signing "wash hands" but not saying it too good. And I just saw on signing time (after he went to bed) that he's signed wash clothes a number of times but I haven't understood him. :mellow:
4/11 truck, something resembling "aaron burr" (because we were eating cookies with milk and the kids were saying "aawon buww") and possibly "omigosh". Now he's trying to whistle.
4/16 watermelon, which was fun because later at a potluck he got some. He also read P.E. off my screen.
5/19: a couple of weeks ago he said "Rudy, get down now" after I said "Let's go now". It's interesting because it was a few words, and not from a video. He was saying "touch" very clearly, which was a good CVCC type thing. Today I thought of words he know involved most alphabet sounds, though his F isn't too good.
6/2: Using some two word phrases, like vitamin C and chocolate milk.
5/29 Cedar bowed his head and closed his eyes during prayers at church. I guess I wasn't. ;)