I'm also starting to wonder if we need to look more into a stealth dyslexia diagnosis. He reads very, very well in context. But it seems like all of the subtests that require reading/identifying letters/words/pictures out of context or quickly are weaknesses. His associational fluency is high (unlike DD8's), but his object naming fluency is low. His letter naming facility is low, writing fluency is low, and math fluency is low compared to his other math scores. His reading vocabulary and word recognition scores don't really match his reading comprehension level (both from this test, DRA-2, and classroom experience). I think that he relies a lot on context to figure things out.
It feels like his highest scores are things he can do in his head, or had context clues for him to use. The lowest scores are identifying pictures/letters/words without context or quickly.
Yes, something may be worth investigating. Although his semantic retrieval fluency is excellent, his rapid naming skills are poor, which is the aspect of fluency that is most relevant for dyslexia and dysgraphia. And his comprehension scores are well above his decoding scores. It is possible that he may be reading largely by sight, though his phonological processing, while much weaker than his language comprehension, is not really so bad that I would be hugely concerned. He can sound out words when he needs to, and I suspect he is decoding well enough. His word recognition score is not at all weak. I think I would be more interested in the dysgraphia direction, although I would still keep an eye on the word-level decoding skills, where he is still relatively young, and the expectations for phonetic decoding are not fully formed in NT 2nd graders.
Regarding Reading Vocabulary: this subtest is not a measure of decoding skills, but of reading comprehension. This is particularly interesting, given what you've noted about his reading in context, as (estimating from his standard score) he did fine as long as there were picture cues for the meaning of the word (which also means they were more concrete vocabulary words), and he just had to identify the synonym from a list, but appears to have reached his limit when he had to identify the specific word in a sentence that was a synonym of the target word (which also meant more abstract words). This suggests to me that he derives a great deal of meaning from text by inferring the overall meaning of the sentence without knowing the exact meaning of many of the individual words. So it's not that he's decoding from context, but that he's
comprehending from context. (ETA: Reading Vocabulary does actually include context for the non-picture-cued items, but you still have to know exactly what the words mean, not approximately.)
And, likely, gradually developing his vocabulary from these context clues. This is also consistent with his exceptionally strong picture-cued expressive and receptive vocabulary. He can match a word to a pictorial depiction of its meaning, but isn't quite solid on purely verbal definitions, which are a more sophisticated demonstration of vocabulary knowledge. It is possible this particular low score will sort itself out in a couple of years, as he narrows down the oral definitions of some of the words for which he currently has a less specific sense of their meaning.
I think we discussed his extremely poor articulation scores previously, and their possible impact on phonetic decoding and encoding (spelling) skills. (Though he's doing better in those areas than I would have expected, if articulation were affecting them significantly.) His motor coordination on the VMI is considerably below his perceptual skills. More evidence for a possible dysgraphic category of concern, and also consistent with an oral-motor basis for his artic weaknesses, rather than a phonological processing basis.
OT & ST make perfect sense. I would carefully monitor both of them, especially with an eye to long-term assistive technologies, as his severe artic issues may make speech-to-text less accessible (depending on how intractable they prove to be), in which case typing may well become a critical part of his future access to written expression. By this I mean that lack of reasonable progress toward functional handwriting or speech-to-text skills should trigger earlier adoption of typing as a primary mode of written communication, as persons with weaker motor coordination usually need more time to achieve fluency in typing.
So yes, I think something may be going on, but I lean toward dysgraphia, rather than dyslexia.
