Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Unexplained delays and further testing

Thanks, Blackcat. What sort of additional testing are you planning to do? I'm not worried about scores, but don't want anyone to underestimate him or to have excessively high expectations from knowing his sister.

He had global developmental delays, with substantial delays in everything except for gross motor. Speech and cognitive were the worst, especially speech. When his cognitive score went up to the low average range, his psychologist said it was a surprisingly rapid improvement. His SLP (and the psychologist) felt his speech issues had caused the earlier low cognitive scores. He has an audiologist (when he was very young, the first audiologist to examine him thought he had hearing loss and he was referred to a pediatric audiologist who was able to determine that his hearing was fine), an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, a psychologist, and a former developmental therapist from early intervention.

A therapist once said she thought he had an auditory processing disorder, but I talked with his audiologist and she referred me to the specialty testing team (an audiologist and SLP) who assured me that his development sounded normal. He was responding more quickly to visual than to verbal commands, but she said that was normal at that age and just to bring him in for an assessment if we continued to have concerns when he was older. He's reaching the age that we could do that if needed.

He was kicked out of Montessori school after one week for looking out the window instead of participating (they didn't refund the tuition or deposit either and told me to take him for an autism evaluation immediately), but his preschool teacher and his current teacher say they don't see social problems and that he is well-behaved with good friends in class. He's had plenty of autism evaluations (one with every annual psychological assessment with multiple different psychologists) and they have thought everything probably stemmed from the language delays ("but continue to monitor as he has to deal with more complex social situations").