Wow - food for thought, thanks aeh. I apologize to all that this question seems to be happening simultaneously in two separate threads, triggered by completely different posts that both have me asking the same questions. Lepa - I really hope this extra discussion is useful with respect to to your OP, and doesn’t complete hijack your post! Please boot me off to another thread if you are finding this discussion too far off track.

So as noted in kathleen'smum's thread on "Dyslexia... finally", our main concern with DS10 is inability to get words out of his head and onto paper. polar bear and bluemagic provided some different takes on this challenge, and I'm sort of attempting to try them on and see if anything fits. Stealth dyslexia? Expressive language? Written expressive disorder? Or is it, as I keep getting told, just the way he is? So I am really trying to understand people’s experience of these different challenges, what it looked like in practice, and how it could be detected by a professional. So many LDs seem to look so different in gifties than usual descriptions; I feel like I might be missing important issues.

Nothing about DS has ever gave us reason to consider ASD - but note caveat above! The descriptions of NVLD I came across in my recent LD research never resonated either, but I’ve just taken a new and more careful look. There are pieces, to be sure, especially around social awkwardness, but the overall NVLD picture doesn’t quite fit. Part of the challenge is that low PRI doesn’t really fit what we observe, either. Anyone who’s met him would likely assume his higher scores would be PRI, rather than VCI. As a typical example, he’s doing fairly advanced computer programming, and the common refrain from his teachers is “I can’t believe how fast he grasps the really complex concepts - but it’s a real challenge to get him to pay attention to the details.” As a toddler, you could see that he could easily picture math concepts in his head, and he “discovered” multiplication, fractions - and multiplication of fractions - on his own as a pre-schooler. Lots of complex symmetry in all his building toys. In math problems that involve any kind of “mapping out” to get to your answer, he’s often there way ahead of me, and I need four steps on paper to slog through and confirm his answer. Computation skills are reasonable - he’s not super fast with his times-tables, for example, but he’s got the answers.

So a 99.9th percentile block design pushes his PRI up to 97th, (despite processing speed at 25th!), but the other two subtests are 50th/ 91st for MR and PC. Just to confuse, he was tested at 8 and 10, and got those same two score both times - but reversed. Part of why I wonder if there’s something odd there. Block design alone seems a limited base for his math tendencies, I would think? Oh, but other confounder - very good working memory (99.6th), which could probably cover a world of sins…

Now applying that more complex reasoning to people, you ask? Hmmm. Very hard to say about a ten-year old boy who loves all the hard sciences, but has zero interest in “anything that doesn’t require electricity” (except black holes, of course). Safe to say he'll never be an arts major. Has high potential for absent-minded professor. It’s distinctly possible weakness in more social aspects of reasoning could be an emerging problem area, but it’s hard to say right now. I will certainly pay more attention to what goes on in English class et al with this lens. Comprehension (AKA “practical social reasoning” is an outlier on both kids VCIs, though it jumped on his between ages 8 and 10 (from 50 to 91, on a VCI now of 99.6th).

So in general - before thinking about your posts here, I would have said abstract concepts were a strength, at least in math, science and engineering areas. Creative, yes; imaginary play, no. I remember his grade 3 teacher commenting that he was the only one who laughed at the jokes she she read more complex (french) books to them. But he is shy, and yes, does have the social skills of an engineer…. But while he can’t express his own emotions well, he is very emotional, and very sensitive to emotions and tone in others. His school record actually states that our two key criteria for teachers are “eccentric” and “cheerful” (turns out we can survive anything as long as we have those two things.)

Sorry - tried really hard not to explode with detail, and didn’t succeed.

Originally Posted by aeh
Does any of this sound consistent? Inconsistent?
To anyone, with anything?