arg.. we were told to withhold all complex speech... speech at the level we knew from the assessment he understood, and from life that he craved. We were asked to reduce our output to "bubble... bubble... BUBle!" despite the fact that he was able to follow multistep commands like "put the cow next to the hey, and then put the horse in the paddock behind the barn" and answer questions like "do you think the ball is in the cup, or do you think it might be in the cup," by nodding, grunting, pointing, and the occasional single word (he may have actually answered the question "is the ball in the cup" with "maybe" rather than picking from two options, I don't quite remember, I remember the conditional made an appearance in lights in the report. (this was at 19 months).
And the type of intervention where you focus on single words like this, despite being the state of the art, correct treatment, has been shown experimentally to be ineffective, in some cases detrimental, by at least one study. Really. I can dig up the reference if you guys would like.
His reaction to the assessment, where they used such restricted language with him was to produce the bloody word they wanted, and then spend a week recovering from the stress of it all.
It's just NOT TRUE that treatment is universally beneficial.
