Thanks for the update! From what you say your little boy sounds pretty normal - for around here :-) I can certainly understand you being surprised you've got a referral to the SLPs given that he's still well under 2 - it's just not that unusual to not speak much at this age, and it doesn't sound as though there's anything wrong with his comprehension. What prompted it, do you know? FWIW, my DS still had fewer than 5 words in regular use at his checkup aged 22 months (I remember because there was a checkbox for that, and I couldn't tick it). Our health visitor, watching him at the appointment, said that if I was worried she'd refer him straight to the speech therapist, but actually she thought he'd have a language explosion very soon and she thought I should just get back in touch if he still wasn't talking in 6 months' time. She was right - I stopped recording his words when he reached 100 words around his 2nd birthday, and by two months after that, he was talking in 4-5 word sentences (and from then on his speech stayed ahead of rather than behind the average). It was amazing.
If yours is reading and spelling and you can tell, I guess he must be ahead of my DS in the speaking line! (We discovered DS could read a bit by accident when he was, what, 16m? - he got very excited at seeing "DVD" in writing - we went so far as to check that he could still read this, and his own name, in handwriting or other fonts than the standard trademark, but didn't explore much further at that age, so I don't know just how much he could read then.) Many of his first "words" were letters of the alphabet (he loved Starfall), and many were numbers. Once he started talking, he didn't look back (someone asked him today, "Do you ever stop talking?" come to think of it...). Some peculiar things I remember: years in which he would recite bits of his favourite books - especially funny at the point where he could talk in 4-5 word sentences, or in paragraphs from Thomas the Tank Engine. A phase a while later, when I'd think he was reciting from a book, but then would notice that he was changing the characters' names to fit the particular things he was playing with, or sticking bits of two stories together. He was using his favourite stories to scaffold his own language acquisition, and at the same time using his memory of the stories to guide his learning to read, I think. An utterly obsessed spelling phase around 2.5yo, in which we couldn't get through a whole minute without his asking "Mummy can you spell" whatever. This faded (and then for a couple of years he wasn't very interested in spelling as such - I think he was just checking his phonetic theory!) and then led into a phase in which he was desperate to learn to read properly - he'd try to read things he didn't know by heart, get a few words in, encounter a word that wasn't phonetically decodable and get frustrated. (At this point I bought him some phonetically based learn to read books, and the rest, as they say, is history.)
I don't actually remember a lot of language-y thoughts communicated in gesture. I think I'm pretty bad at interpreting gesture, though I do remember noticing that we didn't actually seem to have much trouble communicating and that I wasn't sure how it was actually happening! I'm sorry, this isn't much help. We half-heartedly tried sign language, but DS was never that interested (he was at nursery, and they didn't use it there, and we weren't that consistent about using it at home, so I guess he just never got enough exposure).
About the radio: IKWYM about needing one's own fix, but it's only quite recently (he's now 7) that I feel comfortable leaving it on with him around, and even now, I quite often regret it. I do quite often talk to him about what's on the news, but then I want to actually talk to him about it; I don't like the way the news gives you a few impassive sentences about things that can be very shocking and then it's on to the next topic. I really don't feel that adult-oriented news is appropriate for young children, personally.
ETA: we were on the look out for ASD, but have never seriously suspected it in DS. We were watching because I arguably meet the criteria for Asperger's and the same could be said for someone on DH's side of the family. DS has some over-excitabilities; it's possible that there's a relationship between this and his early literacy and his ASDish genetics/environment, but we've never seriously thought that he qualified for a diagnosis or that one would be any use to him; he's a geek, that's all :-)
Last edited by ColinsMum; 10/30/10 12:28 PM.
