Our little guy is aging out of Early Intervention next month and we're figuring out what's next (since we got the high functioning autism diagnosis back in January). His communicative speech is still very delayed though he has made a huge progress in how he communicates with us. He has been getting the standard EI speech therapy with a girl that's just freshly out of college and she certainly doesn't have enough experience to work with a child like him, but it's just a matter of another 3 weeks, so fine with me.
In the meanwhile, I have been trying to figure out what is REALLY wrong with his speech. He has a HUGE vocabulary that he has learned mainly from ebooks that are read to him (by Kindle and by all the kid's ebook readers), he likes to repeat the words while reading the books, he can READ a lot of words, some phonetically, some sight words ... but his big thing is communication ... actual TALKING to us and everyone else. He sticks to one word communication and even that's a big improvement (no more crying and tantrums). At the same time he LOVES to babble in his own way, usually in the evening. He has this whole conversation with you or with himself but it's not real words. It's sequences of mainly vowels and few consonants. It's like listening to some primitive African or Amazonian tribe. It's like words only make sense to him and he can formulate them when he sees them or hears them in a game / computer ... but can't put a sentence or even word together on his own. The more the therapist (or anyone) pushes him, the harder it is for him. I've asked the therapist a few times if she thinks there's something wrong with his mouth (muscle, etc) because he hardly moves his jaws when he talks, making the sounds even more muffled. Her only answer was to practice faces in front of a mirror ... he couldn't care less about a mirror!
So, reading up about all kinds of speech issues, I cam across Childhood Apraxia of speech and to me it sounds very much like what he has! Of all the symptoms I've read, he matches good 90-95% of them! Yet when I asked the therapist (just yesterday) what she thinks about him having Apraxia, she said absolutely not. Said that if he had Apraxia, he wouldn't be able to say the words at all. Not just have problems sometimes. .... but that is NOT what I have read in multiple sources???
He has an full evaluation (ST, OT and DT) this Friday done by our School district to see what services they can offer him once he turns 3, so I will bring it up there and I think I will get him a private evaluation through a place where DS4.5 goes for OT but wanted to ask here ... does anyone have a gifted child with Apraxia? if so, what were they like around 2 or 3 years of age? Both, my husband and I think that most of his problems are NOT autism related but caused by whatever speech issue he has.
