Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Gifted and Speech Delayed?

We're going to the pediatrician tomorrow for DD 22 months. We haven't been since she was 15 months. DD has me totally confused... I can't decide if she is just a bright toddler experiencing asynchronous development, or if I should be watching for something. Everyone keeps saying it is good to catch problems early...

She has hit many 36 month milestones, but won't even attempt two syllable words. She mainly uses vowels, with an occasional m, b, or d sound. She will sign sentences "mommy. milk. points to my chest. please." While saying "eee" for please or "mii?" for milk.

She also freaks out a lot when we are in new surroundings and is terrified of men - even ones she knows, except her dad (and some women, too.) We took her to the mall in a stroller once and she ended up hyperventilating for 20 minutes because too many people smiled at her. And I *do* take my kid out of the house, too! Every new situation usually leads to her clinging to me and crying if anyone makes eye contact. It takes 30-40 minutes for her to relax, and then sometimes she is OK. ;-\

Before 18 months, she knew all her upper and lower case letters and the ASL signs for each. She began trying to write letters at 18 months, now draws squiqqles and circles and sometimes tells me they are things - like "shoe" or "dog".

Recognizes three sight words that I know of: hi, baby, and dog. We taught her them. Recognizes most numbers up to 10 - counts to 2, sometimes 3.

Always pointing out letters and numbers everywhere, even shapes of other objects that look like them (like noticing a tiny cut on her leg looked like an "A".)

Over 350 ASL signs (including letters) by 18 or 19 months. Lost track. I stopped teaching her signs, but she just makes up her own or improvises instead of talking. Won't copy anything I say unless we "sing" with her. Then she mimics what we sing - like "bababa". She sings all day long and that's the only "babbling" she does. She signs a word - like "kite" and will say "ie!" She knows the sounds of a few letters - like says "Sssssss" for s, but doesn't try to say "sss" with any words.

Figured out jigsaw puzzles at 20 months. Now she can do 9-12 pc by herself and helps us put together 24-48 big floor puzzles with a little guidance - even new ones she's never seen. I am amazed at how she sees a tiny part of something and correctly names (signs) it.. like she knows the bottom of an owl is an owl, or that a piece of a dress is a princess.
I'd say she's had a bit of an obsession with letters and puzzles.

Lots of pretend play. Very social - not a lot of "side by side" toddler play. Once she gets comfortable in homeschool group, she watches all the kids and then always tries to recruit them to do what she wants to do (a tea party, a puzzle, ring around the rosie, swing her on the swing, etc.) But she signs to them and they don't know sign language. I've never had to ask her to share and she doesn't get upset when another child steals her toys.

Can match up colors perfectly but I don't know if she has the names down right. 95% potty trained. Goes on her own to the small potty.

Has started calling all writing and words "M" and will turn over toys and objects looking for the writing on the bottom (like Made in China).

Follows new and unique directions.. ask her to put away plastic blocks and building pieces she's only seen once and played with once in the preschool room, and she goes around the room searching only for the plastic pieces (which are mixed in with other junk) that go in the bin, fills it up, and puts the lid on, carefully avoiding things that don't go, like a toy car.


Does any of this raise any red flags for you? I don't want the NP to think I'm being totally ridiculous, but I also don't want to miss anything. And everyone in my family is a little concerned by her lack of trying to say whole words.

As always, with speech delay, you have to worry about hearing loss. I would get an audiology exam in the soundproof since the doctor's quick screen is not accurate. Unfortunately, you really can't get a great hearing test until age 5-6, so you may need to keep get audiology exams.

We took her for a hearing test back around 15 months. We didn't get a full one, but they thought her hearing was fine anyway.. She was giggling because she could hear my stomach growling. She also sings on pitch and can match my pitch or the note on a piano. So I feel like her hearing might be fine.

She sounds as if age gets overstimulated easily, beyond a typical young child - though you have seen her approach and want to interact with others. Because her speech does sound delayed both phonetically and expressively, I think it would be prudent to have her evaluated by a specialist to rule out autism, sensory processing disorders, and other types of speech delays. Someone with great expertise in this area (developmental pediatrician perhaps) will help sort out the subtle markers tor high-functioning autism vs speech.

First thing I would though, is get her an excellent hearing eval - since it seems she is not replicating the beginning /ending consonant sounds (can be a marker for hearing loss) .

My dd is 28 months and really loves to sort things - it's like her zen and has loved puzzles since she was little. But she will also play imagination dress-up, babydolls, and pretend with animals and cars. Is your dd doing this type of
play?

With a baby who's nursing well, I'm less likely to suspect tongue issues, but assuming it's not a hearing issue, my next guess would be a physical obstacle to producing certain sound.

My DD was not a talker or a signer, so got flagged for possible expressive language delay. She drew some amazing-for-a-22-month-old stuff at your DD's age, and then drew nothing identifiable for the next two years. And she's turned out fine, if perfectionistic. So there's not necessarily anything to worry about.

Oops..reread your post which described pretend play.

I agree that a(nother) good audiology exam sounds like a good idea, but I wouldn't worry unduly. There does seem to be a personality type that combines a tendency not to do things until really good and ready and then learn them very fast, with being highly strung and easily overwhelmed in new situations; I have the feeling that we see it a lot around here, though maybe it's not correlated with being here!

FWIW my DS wasn't really talking at all at 22 months (nor signing like your DD) but his speech took off dramatically after that - I've told the story before of being unable to tick the "uses 5 words regularly" box at his 22 month check, and yet he was using 5 word sentences by 26 months. Seems there are quite a few stories like that. He's the kind of child that makes you see why people describe the autistic spectrum as one that goes all the way to normality - he's a geek from a family of geeks with plenty of oversensitivities, and when he was younger I did sometimes wonder whether he might be diagnosable - more in a "might someone misdiagnose him with an ASD" way than a "does he have an ASD" way - but now that he is 8, that seems a bit silly.

Both my sons were speech delayed. DS2.5 still is but DS4 didn't start speaking till he was about 2 years 9 months so still waiting to hit that milestone with DS2.5. DS4 had 10 words total at 24 months ... 9 months later he suddenly started talking in full sentences. He just turned 4 and won't keep his mouth shut! lol ... DS2.5 was even slower, had maybe 6 words at 24 months (including mommy and daddy) ... but aside from the 6 words could count and recognize the numbers to 20 and backwards from 10-0, recognized the whole upper and lower case alphabet, and his first words he learned from then on were all the basic colors and shapes ... but not many useful words for a daily life. He's just not interested. He doesn't talk really unless he's pointing to animals or things naming them (now at 2.5) ... yet we went to the doctor's office and suddenly he stands up in his stroller and says with perfect pronunciation "Let me out!!!" ... I was floored! lol ... and things like that that happened before. He won't do single words or two words but suddenly blurs out a whole phrase. ... so very asynchronous.

Both have speech therapy but DS4 doesn't really need it. We just keep him there to have our foot in the door for Special ed in the school district. DS2.5 get speech therapy through early intervention but we're not really worried about the speech. His brain clearly works fine, he's just not interested in speaking for the moment.

I'd have your DD evaluated by Early Intervention if you're concerned, and most likely you'll get their services (sounds like she might have some sensory sensibilities too?) ... but yes, it's possible to have a gifted child who's speech delayed.

Oh, and I almost forgot ... DS2.5 now has a vocabulary of probably 100-150 words he says ... and has been able to READ about 2/3 of those words the last 2 months! (words like octopus, tiger, zebra ... not just cat, hat, etc. simple sight words) When I tell someone he's speech delayed and reading, they usually laugh into my face!

Look at this from your DD's perspective: Talking is hard. Why talk when there's signing?

The primary motivation for kids to work on their linguistics is the need to be understood. She doesn't have that need, and so, she's not working on it. It's not a priority.

One way you might try to make it a priority for her again is to pretend you forgot sign language.

Otherwise, the only thing that seemed like any kind of real "red flag" is her fear of strangers. Apart from that, it sounds like she's doing awesome.

Colinsmum...my ds was the same. He was a late-talker and progressed rapidly (though it was hard to understand what he said because his speech was terrible...TERRIBLE. ) He also seemed like he could "go either way" before about 3ish with ASD. He was fascinated with numbers, letters, symbols, moving parts, maps - and did very little pretend play. He also seemed immature compared to his friends. But at 6... those quirks have evened out with his sociability, silly imagination, and other more "typical" kid things. His brain just developed differently.

Not me. I don't know what it's like to have a non-reading child, because DS was reading at least somewhat before he could talk (I still feel the curiosity about how much, but at the time I was squeamish about doing the deliberate tests it would have taken to find out, so I only have the bits we found out by accident!) and then he learned to speak and read better in parallel. There was a delightful phase in which he could speak in 4-5 word "newly minted" sentences, or in paragraphs from Thomas the Tank Engine!

Let me just add that although Dude's suggestion to forget sign language may seem logical, I think it would be beyond cruel. She already has plenty of incentive to speak; you described her trying to communicate with other children and failing because they don't sign.

Yep. My ds used one word "sentences" when he began to read. And even odder yet, his first words (beyond "mama" "no" and "dada") were all prepositions (on, off, up, down, in, out). We were ecstatic when ds finally said "ball". My dd, OTOH, talked in full sentences incredibly early - luckily we didn't have them in reverse. Easy to go from late talking to early than the reverse.

Mine too. DS10 had to learn the ABCs before he had any significant number of spoken words, and his talking came along in parallel with his reading. He did have lots of ear infections, but I would attribute this in retrospect to his ASD and the need to figure out a way to process and cope with language.

DeeDee

I think seeing the pediatrician is a good idea. From what you've written, it sounds like your dd is really doing very well, and while she may be behind in speech my guess is it's simply because she's been focusing on learning other things. Most of the young children I've known (gifted or not) tend to develop in spurts where they'll make leaps and bounds of progress in one area but maybe seem not quite on track in another, then all of a sudden the area that they didn't seem to be making forward motion on leaps ahead too... more so than steady linear across-the-board progress. That said, my ds12 didn't talk until he was 3, and made very few sounds ever, didn't babble. We didn't think anything was going on at the time simply because he was ahead of the game in other areas, and we didn't have him evaluated for speech when he was young. Fast forward to mid-elementary school and although he was a very verbal kid, he also had an expressive language disorder and he's been in speech therapy for several years now. I can't help but wonder if he would have been farther ahead earlier on if we'd taken him for EI when he was little.

It never hurts anything to take your child in for an evaluation - every eval any of my kids have had has been mostly fun for my kids If you find out nothing's up, that's good information! And if you discover that there is a challenge, the earlier you can start working on it the better you'll feel and most likely the better progress your dd can make and it will make things easier once she's older and in school.

Re the sensory things - having a professional help you sort those out will also be worthwhile - they can be due to soooo so many things, including personality and possibly just a phase. My older dd is a highly sensory kid - when she was young she screamed (we're talking Horror Flick level screaming :D) whenever she went anywhere new. It started at 2 and got so bad by the time she was 4 we couldn't take her *anywhere* she hadn't already been before and was comfortable. We took her to see a psychiatrist at 4 who recommended sensory OT and it helped quite a bit, but ironically it didn't help the real challenge, just gave her a way to cope with her sensory overload. We found out later, when she was in 2nd grade, that she was seeing double vision and that was what was really going on when she was so young and we took her to new places - she was freaked out because she couldn't see. She also had heightened auditory awareness because she relied on her hearing due to the sight challenges, which had an additional impact when she was somewhere new where there was noise or a lot of people etc - it was much noticeably loud to her than to us. So what I'm trying to say is - it may just be sensory with your dd, or it could be that what looks like a sensory challenge is a reaction due to some different type of challenge. Our dd is still relatively sensory even though she's much older now and her vision is corrected and she's not afraid of new places - she still has very sensitive hearing, responds to touch/odors etc, and she is still a "screamer" in perhaps a more grown-up type of manner - she can get quite dramatic over very little things, such as how to use a matrix of coins to explain multiplication (last night's math homework).

Sorry, getting off track here - but fwiw I think you're doing the right things - trust your instincts and you (and your dd) will be fine

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - I agree with the others who said not to drop the signing - that's her way of communicating and she's good at it and getting her message across. You can also tell that she's not behind in receptive language thanks to her signing and actions.

This isn't supported by research. Humans are social animals that want to communicate. Successful communication begets more successful communication. More likely is that either there is something preventing this child from developing the speech abilities, or it's developmental and she'll get there when she gets there.

Islandofapples, the bit I'm picking up on is the lack of consonant sounds. Start with the ped for feedback and screening, and then head on over to an audiologist for a complete workup. My DS' speech therapy for these phonological gaps was pretty quick and painless (at least in retrospect), and it ended up teaching him to read in the process.

We got the brush off from several directions when I was still asking about these things at 34 months. 36 months is the magic age when you get the attention of a ped. If you get the brush off, see if you can consult with a speech and hearing center or university language lab.

This is so true! And 36 months is a very big deal (at least it is where we're at) because that's the age at which a child is no longer eligible for EI but instead has to go through the school district for speech etc evals. In our area, it's easier to get into EI than into speech therapy etc through the school district... so another reason to seek help early.

FWIW, you don't have to have a ped's referral for EI or for a school district eval (at least we don't - I don't know if it's the same everywhere). And there are sometimes long waits - but there are also official timelines and deadlines for how quickly either EI or the school district must respond when a parent makes a request for an eval, so the best thing to do if you want to go through EI is to ask for an veal now and if in the meantime you meet with your ped and decide that everything's ok, you can cancel the EI appointment.

Outside of EI and the school district, we found we couldn't get into evals for speech/hearing/etc by private professionals or our children's hospital etc without a referral from a ped. When our ds was older we were able to, but when our kids were preschool age and younger we definitely had to have referrals just to get on waiting lists.

polarbear

I have absolutely no reason to believe our ped was trying to keep us from the EI system. Instead, we were repeatedly told "that's not something to worry about until he's 3." As in, they have developmental milestones that are somewhat discrete: Lack of consonants before 3 could still develop ok on their own; Lack on consonants after 3 needs an evaluation. Evidently, things might still develop if the child is 2 year and 364 days old.

As far as speech sounds, I believe before the age of two, children should have mastered vowel sounds and are only beginning to master b,m,w,n, and p. I remember my DD could not say the /h/ until right before she turned 3, and that was not considered delayed.

I found a link to a sound chart that may help.

the main reason why I've had BOTH boys go through EI was to get our foot in the door when it comes to dealing with the school district! In our area it's so much easier to go this route than through other evaluations! I was able to get my 4-year old a private Speech Evaluation on a fairly short notice last week but only because we already do OT at that same place so we didn't have to do the whole long waiting list. But in general, if there's any doubt and the child is under 3, go through EI to get things started! ... I have friends with two children (non-gifted) who are close to my boys ages (4 and just turned 3) and with the 4-year old they had to do evaluations through the school district since she wasn't in EI to get her into Special Ed for services but with the younger one I kept pushing my friend into doing the EI eval for their son just 3 months before he turned 3 and the whole process of him getting into the district special ed preschool was so much easier! ... they both need a lot of ST and some OT.

Oh, and I should add ... our pedi never suggested EI ... it was ME looking into our options when I was wondering why our 2 year old wasn't talking. So I contacted the EI myself and went from there.

We had 3 - Three (!?)- speech evals for ds between 2.5 - 4 (ish). We went through EI, then a local university clinic, and lastly a private therapist. Though incidental, our experiences were very similar at each setting as far as recommendations: his phonetic delays were developmentally 'normal ' (they should self-correct) and we were doing at home everything ds needed to improve. I really appreciated each eval. The first with EI was probably the most biased as they did speech and were required to do developmental. My stinking 2 year old was in rare form, reading the pages, doing somersaults, discussing math - be probably would have needed to be not talking at ALL to qualify. Just a warning.

lol ... when DS4 had his EI eval at 25 months (when he still only had 10 words and nothing else ... not even numbers and such like the younger one would later on) ... he still almost didn't qualify because he was masking all his problems so well!

While toddlers will get flagged for not having five words at 18 months or 50 at 24 months to make sure something isn't wrong, it is still within the range of normal for a child not to say his first word until he turns two. I believe the average at 24 months old is somewhere between 150 and 300 words. And, approximations still count a this age.

I'm not saying your DD is not language delayed. I don't know. But, I think it is easy to expect more from your child than what is fair especially when they are showing uneven development.

Also, 18 months was the peak of our DD's stranger anxiety, and that did not get better until right around 2.5. What you are describing sounds pretty normal to me. Our DD would try to claw her way inside me around her grandparents at that age. She was fine out in public until anyone got in her face.

The obsession with letters does not seem unusual for this age to me, either. As long as it is not interfering with her daily life I think it is okay. It does seem to be an age for obsessions, whether trains, dinosaurs, construction vehicles, letters, or backyardiagans. The fact that she is into pretend play bodes well.

She sounds a lot like my DD - very advanced in some areas but delayed in speech. She babbled and cooed as an infant, started saying "ma ma" and "da da" fairly early on, and then... stopped. (Both my kids did this, actually). Not another word until she was 24 months. Instead she'd stare into your eyes and point to whatever she wanted (we never taught her how to sign).

She had a proper hearing test done and passed it. She was sent to a speech pathologist who taught us the "Hanen, It Takes Two to Talk" instructional method, and voila: success.

http://www.hanen.org/hanen-programs/programs-for-parents/it-takes-two-to-talk-parent-program.aspx

I believe it worked for DD(now 9) because I really think her speech delay was due to perfectionism. As soon as I silenced my constant stream of verbalizing and adopted the Hanen "child-led" approach which involves speaking one word at a time about whatever the child is focusing on, DD started speaking. She quickly made up for lost time and went from nothing to complete sentences in several weeks

Just my story: my son was labeled speech delayed when he was 2. He only had 20 words. He was started in speech therapy. He STILL didn't talk and 8 months later was diagnosed with autism. He started ABA and immediately (as in during the ABA evaluation!) started talking. Speech therapy alone did nothing because we had the wrong diagnosis and it was the wrong therapy for him at that time.

I'm telling this story so you don't wait 6 months to reevaluate like we did. If what you are doing is not working, look for something else. I wish we had gotten the appropriate diagnosis and started the appropriate therapy right away.

End result: my son is now 9 and has been a DYS since age 7. And he never stops talking...

Sign language is successful communication.

But I think geofizz's point is regarding your original claim, that "Talking is hard. Why talk when there's signing? The primary motivation for kids to work on their linguistics is the need to be understood. She doesn't have that need, and so, she's not working on it. It's not a priority."

Kids who are developing normally don't need to "work on" acquiring language. It's what their brains are built to do. Expose them to multiple languages, they'll learn them all. Hearing kids who grow up in deaf signing households learn the spoken language of the surrounding community with no problem.

I agree with others that this is a speech delay, and while it could work itself out (as some here have experienced), it warrants a look from a professional.

Yes, and then geofizz supported that point while ostensibly refuting it, via discussion of "successful communication."

Keep in mind, we're not talking about baby signs here. This child has a signing vocabulary of 350 words, and is making up more all the time.


Yes, and the child we're talking about here has clearly learned both languages. That's independent of speech.


Citation? I think it would be hard to find rigorous studies on families where all adult members of the household are deaf, because how many are there?

Here's some anecdotal information: http://journalstar.com/news/local/article_a1eea10f-f66f-5a57-a4a3-e6cb7fbf86a9.html

And it backs up my point:

I think this is an important point. I wonder, though, if this will change as she gets older and is exposed to more people who don't understand sign language. It would be interesting to know how many of the people she is with everyday are fluent in sign, rendering verbal speech unnecessary.

This is such an interesting topic... the need to communicate Vs. having learned vocabulary. Neither of my (non-verbal until 24 months) kids knew any sign, but I can't even guess as to what DD's vocab was. I could ask for anything and she'd point to it. I lost track of how many words she knew. It didn't seem to bother her, though, that she couldn't speak or sign. Maybe that's because I hovered and anticipated her needs so she didn't have to verbalize them?

Then there's my DS... when he started talking it was within a day or two of his 2nd birthday. He went from being completely non-verbal to handing me alphabet blocks and naming them all (he knew all 26). He just... decided to start talking, out of nowhere. Boom, just like that. I'm going to start talking by telling mommy what these letters are called.

How is that a need to be understood? Or is that a form of hyperlexia? (i.e. is that a typical child, a spectrum child, a gifted child, or simply a quirky one?) He was looking at me, making excellent eye contact, and talking to me. But he wasn't saying "mama, up" or "juice please" or whatever. Instead it was "cee! dee! efff! emmm!" etc etc as he correctly handed me the corresponding block for each. Within weeks, just like DD after her late start, DS was also speaking in sentences. It's as if once they started, the flood gates just opened.

Islandofapples - when your DD signs, is she engaging with you or is she just labeling objects? Is she engaged and connected or is she encyclopedic and methodical?

They're so interestingly unique that it can be hard to identify warning signs. There's no harm in pursuing professional help though - that way your bases are covered.

Not sure what you mean...
She wants everything done her way and insists that I get what she's signing (and sometimes saying with one syllable) and won't back down about it until I acknowledge what she's trying to tell me. Usually it is about what she's observing. She wants to tell me when she sees numbers, letters, writing, shapes, animals, etc. She also points and I'll tell her what stuff is or explain more about it, but mostly she tells me what she thinks she's seeing and I confirm. This started way back at 11.5 months when she started "Reading" her picture books and signing what she saw and would "ask" for confirmation about real life objects. Like a semi-truck pulled up next to us in our car and she asked me if it was an airplane. So I had to go figure out the sign for truck after that.

She just carried a stool over to her play table and is signing "please" and pointing to me and then the chair to get me to move to her table lol.

Dude, I'm not sure what the rest of your point is, but I can address this:

Reliable numbers of deaf signers in the U.S. are hard to come by, but estimates are around .5 million. Most of them marry other fluent signers. And ninety percent of their children have normal hearing. So how many CODAs (children of deaf adults) are there? Probably millions.

Some do need a bit of speech therapy, if they don't have much interaction with the hearing community in their early years, but they catch up quickly when they hit school age. But most pick up speech very early from hearing relatives, friends, babysitters, neighbors, etc., in the same way that immigrant children pick up English even if their parents don't speak it.

Sorry I don't have a citation, but citing this is a bit like providing a citation that Muslim-Americans exist. (Actually a very apt comparison, since there's a similar lack of hard data, but nobody doubts that a substantial population exists.) A bit of googling will back up my claims.

Here's a good intro to just how normal (and fluently bilingual) CODAs are: CODA Brothers

Yes, hearing children of completely deaf parents develop normal speech. Some of that is probably because they also have peers in school, etc. who interact with them.
Before hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc., the average person who was born completely deaf only reached a third grade reading level. That is because you need to exercise and develop the auditory part of the brain- if you can't, that part of the brain "dies off" (think of auditory processing disorder). The brain operates on a "use it or lose it" type of principle!
I would never sit on speech delay. I have said this over and over- hearing loss in children can be very subtle and easy to miss. My son had three normal hearing screens (three years in a row) at hte pediatrician's before I got an audiology exam and learned that he is almost deaf in one ear.
My son has always been extremely verbal and articulate. He has never had a speech delay, FWIW.

If there's a deaf adult and a hearing adult in the family, and the hearing adult insists that the child must speak, then the child will develop speech. That's why my question was limited to households where all adults are deaf, because that's the nearest analog to what we're talking about here.

I'm not sure how you get "millions" of CODAs from half a million deaf signers. The math doesn't work. They'd have to marry and proliferate at a significantly higher rate than the hearing population.

We have a large body of hard data on the existence of Muslim-Americans, via the US Census.

Again, I'm not really following you. The OP was about a hearing household where the child is getting a ton of incidental exposure to speech. Furthermore, most deaf signers DO marry other deaf signers. Those that don't, tend to marry hearing fluent signers (for example, CODAs), and most of the communication in the household is still in ASL. In fact the hearing parent often makes a deliberate effort to only sign with the hearing child(ren), because otherwise they (the children) will push things towards spoken communication and lose their fluency in ASL (the same thing that tends to happen to immigrant children).

The ONLY thing I'm trying to address here is your claim that children won't acquire a language unless they're forced to "work" at it. This is counter to everything we know about language acquisition.

You're right, I was doing hasty math (getting contaminated by other stats floating around in my brain that aren't relevant here). Let's revise that to ~.5 million CODAs, roughly replacement rate. I don't believe this changes anything about my point.

Untrue. Google it.

I actually need to step in here with a slight correction. The 3rd-grade reading level thing is due to language deprivation in childhood, not auditory deprivation. It was the result of a century of oral-only dogma in deaf schools. The deaf kids who have the HIGHEST English reading and writing skills (often college-level or higher) are . . . deaf children of deaf signing parents. The kids who get full exposure to a natural language from birth.

I agree. Language acquisition is too important, and it has a window.

All of this is argument by assertion.

Untrue. Google it. [/quote]

Okay.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0075.pdf

Technically not of US Census origin, but they're providing it, and it still qualifies as a large body of hard data. 200,000+ interviews is pretty solid.

Even though this thread went kind of off-track, I'm going to keep it updated (if only for the fact that lurkers will probably search and find it if they need it.)

DD qualified for speech therapy with the early intervention program. Right after we went to the appt, we went and got her tongue tie and lip tie clipped and she now has much better mobility with her tongue. The posterior tongue tie apparently caused an underbite. She's still not talking very much, but it's only been a week, so we'll see.

Yay for progress!

A friend on fb feed posted pics of her daughter's lip tie a few months ago and I began researching and discovered DD had lip tie and posterior tongue tie. I was lucky to have a local dentist who regularly sees them and fixes them with a laser, so we took her to him. He was able to diagnose officially and fix them both.

She's actually trying to copy more of our words this week, so we'll see where it goes from here.


ETA 2014 - if anyone finds this thread with the same questions -- she had a speech therapist after this, but she didn't need it. As soon as we fixed the lip and tongue ties she started talking. She's talking in very long sentences / paragraphs now at 3.5.