Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Strange choice of words

I find that my 7 yo dd (FSIQ of 149 but lower VCI of 124) has odd word choices. I have kept this opinion to myself until my neighbor, who is a teacher, pointed it out in a friendly "oh those M***-isms" - using her name basically. The only examples I can think of at the moment are:

"She damaged her finger." instead of saying somebody hurt their finger or injured it.

And she said "We are going to fetch some cars." when they wanted to flag some cars down for their lemonade stand.

I wish I could think of some others but I'm drawing a blank at the moment. But basically she just uses words that I find fit in strangely with what she is saying if that makes sense. It's really rather cute but I have been concerned lately about the possibility that she could be on the spectrum somewhere and was wondering if this might by a red flag.

I waiver between her quirkiness being a result of her giftedness or something more.

My DD does this too - I think it has to do with her super high verbal abilities and the high level audio books she listens to. The words are always used correctly, just not what you would expect from a second grader. For example every year she does a lemonade stand for charity so we were at DH's campus selling lemonade during a softball game. A student ran back to his dorm room to grab some money but told her that he was buying 2 cups - one for himself and one for his friend. When he came back to pay her DD said "Oh your companion already got his."

Not "friend". Not "the other guy". "Companion". A perfectly appropriate word but not what most kids her age would have used. Probably not what most adults would have used either. She also would say "damaged her finger" but not sure about the "fetch some cars."

Ironically there was a big fuss at school last week because she was asked to make a sentence for the word "pay" and she "couldn't think of an appropriate second to third grade level sentence" for it. She'll give you a sentence for "reimburse" or "expertise" but they were making a fuss over her not giving them a sentence for "pay". Sometimes the quirky giftedness just comes out of left field...

I don't know. I did this a LOT between age 5 and 15. Mostly it was because I learned vocabulary through reading a lot, and therefore, I had a good operational/contextual idea of what words meant, but not enough life experience to actually understand what was normative in conversational language, if that makes sense?

I can't remember some of them, but one really struck my 6th grade teacher as shocking-- when I reported a particular author's work as:

permeated, saturated, and later... perforated...

with particular qualities/characteristics.

Yes, I knew what perforated meant. I just thought that it was (kind of) applicable. I also thought it was much more spicy than repeating the term "permeated" in that essay. I also liked larger, more sophisticated vocabulary, and definitely chose to use a greater variety of words, particularly in my writing. I had learned by then that doing so VERBALLY really marked one as an oddball in the communication department.

I still occasionally choose a word that strikes others as unusual. It's more deliberate now, and I often choose that as an expression of how my own inner landscape differs from most others, I think.

This is interesting because my DS8 does this too. He's sort of beside the spectrum (doesn't meet the dx criteria) and has an ADHD dx. He also has a language processing issue, which makes it all the more curious.

I'm kind of drawing a blank too, but "I've succeeded" instead of "I won" comes to mind. I know there are a few more though.

Hard to guess if that is flexibility or inflexibility in language. Unless she is very rigid about he word choices, I'd assume she is playing with language as one might with Legos.

My younger daughter does this and has since she was two. It wasn't until we learned she has trouble pronouncing several sounds that we realized why; she simply chooses the word that is easiest for her to say even if it isn't the best. They still fit, they just seem odd coming from the mouth of six-year old with a speech impediment.

DS4.5 does this all the time. He hears a word ... he remembers it ... he uses it. He doesn't read yet but absorbs any word anywhere. As much as I keep the boys giftedness fairly hidden from our friends and everyone, I do sometimes post the stuff he says on FB for our friends to see and they all love it. None of my posts ever get so many likes like the stuff that comes out of his mouth. The child who didn't start speaking till he was almost 3 went from nothing to just the other extreme. I really wonder how he'll do once we have him tested some day. If it will show in his scores or if it's just a thing he does for everyone's amusement, including himself?

when I hear him say something unusual I ask if he knows what it means and he always give me some great definition or another word or five to substitute. So he clearly does have those words in his vocab.

My ds did this from an early age (still does but it's less obvious now that he's older)... like HK, I have always felt it was most likely due to getting his vocabulary through reading way-ahead-of-age-peers-level books. Also perhaps from listening to NPR lol!

It's not something I'd worry about unless you're seeing other things that you're worried about...

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - fwiw, my ds has had WISC testing twice, and his VCI vs PIQ has flip-flopped (one higher, one lower). What has been consistent over time are his scores on achievement tests that measure verbal-related skills - those are consistently sky high. With just one WISC and a very high FSIQ, I'd wonder if your dd's VCI score is really an accurate reflection of her abilities, or if something wasn't clicking for her during the test that had nothing to do with what was being tested. Were her VCI subtest scores all similar or were there discrpancies?

my DD5 entertains herself with words, too. she chooses hilarious stuff like "that word is far too sesquipedalian for me to pronounce" when "i need help" would probably do. her teachers have commented on it (negatively - sigh) and i know it sets her apart in conversation with peers, but i'm pretty sure she'll modulate that as she gets older.

i've just put it down to her innate love of precision - if she's got a word that really nails the idea, she'll run with it...

If you have other reasons for concern I'm going to pipe up and say get a pragmatic language assessment. My DD, who has Aspergers, has a similar verbal iq (pretty stable across 3 tests each 2 yrs apart). She just recently had a language assessment, the CELF4 had wild scatter from the 99.9th down to the 40, but nothing too low, average score "normal", but well lower than VCI. The tester then administered a purely social/pragmatic language test which he best score was BELOW the 40th, ranging down to the 1st, overall score 16th which I'm thinking is 3SDs from VCI.

She's 11, it's NEVER occurred to anyone she needed a speech therapist - until I finally read enough to think "hang on these 'social' and 'behaviour' problems we are having might be a pragmatic language issue (and literalness of course)".

So my DD with a VCI in the near gifted range, great diction, good vocab, etc, is about to start speech therapy...