I'm not a lot of help, but I know with my ds7 we help his verbal language skills by pairing them as often as we can with visual language. (In his case, he mostly learned to speak after he learned to read. We subtitle everything he watches, write out as many instructions as we can, etc.)
Does he still confuse before and after if you give him a written definition, etc?
No... he's fine if he sees it in writing. His reading is better than his speech (and he has strabismus, too... poor kid!) So if I show him something in writing, he totally gets it. However the minute I take away the writing... he's back to square one.
Another example comes to mind... he asked me what "HP" stands for. I said "Hewlett Packard" and what I got back from him was bizarre. "Hewa Poh-dar? Hee-da Powa?" etc etc. I finally wrote it down for him and he said "Oh!! Hewlett Packard!" It sounds like classic CAPD, but he sailed through those tests.
I asked the audiologist about his receptive language score and she questioned it, saying he had enough language development to pass the closure portion of the CAPD test (where they muffle the beginning and endings of words so they have to fill in the words using context).
In other words, he pulled the muffled words out of his head, but now as I type this... I wonder if he had those words to access from his reading, rather than receptive language. I wish I'd thought of that to ask the audiologist...
