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22b I loved your response that input is easier - but I'm not sure it's true for my kids!!! My eldest categorically has a 50 percentile plus gap between receptive language and expressive (expressive higher).

And I have vivid memories of my youngest as a one yr old, walking around the first hour or two every morning practicing the words for things or asking for new words and generally repeating everything she heard (bordering on echolalia). For her speaking seemed to be a necessary part of her storage/filing system (like taking written notes at an exam I guess). She she still speaks-to-process, and is NEVER quiet....

Conversely decoding text doesn't come easily to them, their reading is highly dependent on context and meaning. My second child for example would test years lower on reading tests like the schonnel test which are based on pure decoding of random words, compared to what she could read in meaningful text...as early readers my kids really could not read beyond their comprehension level.

Still fascinated by the differences in the way people's brains work.

This is so interesting to me because when I think of how my son learns through auditory this is how I "see" it in him... He speaks to process information. He discusses and repeats and solidifies understanding through discussion. And like I said before, the neuropsych testing allegedly shows he learns primarily auditorily. And yeah I feel like he never shuts up, he is constantly asking questions and 'discussin' until he understands, etc. He does learn from reading though. But he does not seem to visualize or get much out of visual information at all.. except reading BUT he tends to like to read out-loud to comprehend. Also, teachers tend to see him spacing out which he does do a fair amount of no doubt... but what I see a lot is him mumbling to himself something he just learned and is trying to process, etc... He also asks people to repeat themselves a lot ... again some see this as attentional (and no doubt some times it is) BUT I often see this as him almost memorizing/processing what he just heard so he needs the person to repeat b/c he just mumbled-while-processing the last thing the person said and they moved on too quickly... I probably sound wacky LOL... it's hard to explain!

Yes passions provide good examples of hard working leading to good results. But seeing the importance of hard working is still quite different from being able to actually work hard...

Here are some dictionary definitions:

Success:
The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted: attributed their success in business to hard work.

I think it's good to have long term goals or dreams and work hard towards them. Success means achieving the goals, but can also mean making important progress towards them.

Irena, it is a hard thing to explain to someone who has never run into one of those people. My DD 'thinks' using her mouth. LOL.

She can DICTATE text about 2-4 years beyond what she can type for herself, much less write longhand. It's really astonishing.

Interestingly, my DD used to be one of those "I have no internal monologue" kids--yap yap yap yap--and became much less so. One of the weird things for me when she learned to read was that suddenly, I didn't know where she was at all times (before, you could just follow the sound of her voice). Also, her dictated writing used to be much better than her written writing, but we've seen that change as well. She was a super early talker and appeared somewhat echolalic as a tiny toddler--used huge chunks of "lifted" speech in her dialogue (but not from movies--from what she'd heard us say). Now she writes wonderful original prose.


Minds! So cool.

Yeah-- oddly, my DD has never been a read-aloud kid, either. I know exactly what you mean about not having an auditory beacon to follow!! She did the echolalia-like thing, too-- from everything around her-- movies, TV, radio, conversations. It was really creepy, but there was something about her intonation that would "shift" slightly when she was using whole chunks from elsewhere. I always knew-- but I was the only one who knew that it was 'borrowed' content that she was trying out. She usually managed to place it completely appropriately contextually, so people other than me didn't understand that she was quoting Emeril rather than making it up as she went. It wasn't exactly echolalia, either, because as noted, she was using it IN context. It was almost like a word-acquisition skill on steroids. She acquired whole phrases or paragraphs and used them. It gradually stopped when she was about five or six.

Scarily familiar. I'm an auditory learner; DS is a few degrees beyond me. I swear he can quote entire conversations from memory if he wants. Sometimes I have the feeling of déjà vu--probably because part of a months-old conversation is being replayed in a new situation.

I think it's partly genetic. DH has this weird skill where he can come up with movie quips for pretty much ANYTHING, and he also has phenomenal auditory recall. Definitely not a 'normal' part of what most little ones do, though! DD was always aware that she was doing it, though-- and often could identify where she had lifted the content from, if that makes sense.

So she'd say something... I'd nod and smile, then ask "Where did that come from?"

"Oh, Magenta said it." (Or something like that.) It was a little sly, like "oh, you noticed! Heehee-- Just checking!"



Oddly, I found it comforting. I always knew that anything she 'shouldn't' hear from other adults around her, I'd know about. She had a marvelous perverse streak that way.

DS did this too, but much younger, when he was first learning to talk. He had a delightful phase when he could talk in reasonably standard 4-5 word telegraphic sentences - or in fluent paragraphs from Thomas the Tank Engine. (He'd cut them about, change names etc. to fit his context, but clearly couldn't yet come up with anything like that level of language "from whole cloth".)