On the clinical side of things, unresolved language issues (expressive or receptive, but especially expressive) tend to coincide with a decrease in IQ scores over time.
I'm curious about this too -
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So to everyone, anything you could share on what we should look for, tell-tale drops in scores, questions we should ask, links to descriptions of what expressive language deficits actually look like in a verbally-gifted child, etc, would be most appreciated.
Platypus, I'm out of online time for this morning
so will have to come back later to respond in detail, but fwiw, the testing that was useful in diagnosing my ds' expressive language disorder was the TOWL (Test of Written Language) and the CELF (not sure what CELF stands for, but this is typically given by a Speech Language Pathologist). For my ds, the TOWL showed clear deficits in written expression skills; his CELF scores weren't horribly low, but had large discrepancies (over 99% for some subtests, down around average for others). His SLP evaluator also noted that on the parts he scored lower, he took a *long* time to come up with answers, even when he answered correctly. His writing experiences in school and at home pointed to challenges with written expression, and.. probably ultimately the most helpful thing in helping us realize that yes, he really did have an issue (and what prompted me to seek out the SLP eval), was ds telling us that he had trouble with it - he started verbalizing his difficulties with getting his thoughts out in 4th grade. It was around this same time that we (parents) started to realize that it was specific types of writing prompts that were issues for ds, and that while we thought he was an "extremely verbal" child because he talked *all the time* and with big concepts at home, we realized that when we attempted conversations that paralleled the types of writing prompts that he struggled with, the verbal skills also disappeared.
More later
polarbear
