FWIW, I think my DD, who is actually very gifted verbally, has some pragmatic language difficulties. This helps to explain her word problem issues, IMO. She sometimes is completely stymied by phrasing in a problem that seems like it should be obvious. It may have nothing to do with math. She just needs me to say, "What they mean is..." a few different ways. I suspect this is related to some of her ASD traits--rigidity about interpreting words and phrases or something.
My son does this as well. He takes the wording so literally that he gets frustrated and ends up over-analyzing questions. Often the problems are terrible written and he's correct that they can't be done the way they are written. On the other hand most of the other kids seem to be able to interpret the question it was intended or make the inference that was left out.
