Author Topic: Language Acquisition (Read 12048 times)

pooka · « **on:** March 03, 2015, 06:20:28 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #1 on:** March 11, 2015, 03:39:32 PM »

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.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #2 on:** March 22, 2015, 08:51:39 PM »

Quote from: pooka on March 03, 2015, 06:20:28 AM

So you just never know with kids.

It's like Winnie the Pooh says, "You never can tell with bees"

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #3 on:** March 22, 2015, 08:54:03 PM »

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.

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #4 on:** March 22, 2015, 09:00:05 PM »

How many months old now?

Brinestone · « **Reply #5 on:** March 23, 2015, 07:59:24 PM »

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.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #6 on:** April 04, 2015, 06:00:02 PM »

Quote from: Tante Shvester on March 22, 2015, 09:00:05 PM

How many months old now?

15

pooka · « **Reply #7 on:** April 11, 2015, 12:05:56 PM »

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.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #8 on:** April 18, 2015, 08:08:49 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #9 on:** April 24, 2015, 05:55:35 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #10 on:** April 24, 2015, 05:58:13 AM »

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.

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #11 on:** April 24, 2015, 09:08:44 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #12 on:** April 26, 2015, 06:58:03 PM »

Sputnik talked before he walked. But he was tail end of normal age for walking.

pooka · « **Reply #13 on:** June 04, 2015, 11:14:12 AM »

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.

rivka · « **Reply #14 on:** June 04, 2015, 11:36:20 AM »

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."

pooka · « **Reply #15 on:** June 05, 2015, 02:31:49 PM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #16 on:** June 07, 2015, 09:17:26 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #17 on:** June 09, 2015, 09:49:29 PM »

Cedar said "ready, set... go" several times at the store tonight. He also called tomatoes "red" and half sang brahms lullabye with us

rivka · « **Reply #18 on:** June 09, 2015, 10:26:45 PM »

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #19 on:** June 10, 2015, 08:58:16 AM »

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #20 on:** June 10, 2015, 09:00:15 AM »

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.

pooka · « **Reply #21 on:** June 12, 2015, 09:18:29 AM »

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.

Annie Subjunctive · « **Reply #22 on:** June 12, 2015, 10:21:22 AM »

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!"

rivka · « **Reply #23 on:** June 12, 2015, 11:58:06 AM »

pooka · « **Reply #24 on:** July 03, 2015, 09:09:12 AM »

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.