His receptive language is very very above age ranges, his expressive _language_ actually is too, HOWEVER, he has less than the expected number of "regular" words... words he uses every day.
"Expressive language delay" is a technical term, but you're correct, it's a misnomer, it is usually used to mean "speech delay," as it is being used here. It SHOULD be used more accurately, and I don't know where in the chain things go awry, but most of the published studies also misuse it. It's slightly muddy in that signs are counted towards speech.
I have noticed that his development is unusual, but I don't think anything is wrong. Interestingly, a lot of people on here have noted similar patterns with their kids, but more importantly, his pattern is similar to mine, but less abnormal.
He's 1.5. My understanding is that variability at this age is so great that it's not actually a good idea to assess yet, but our dr made us do it, and the SLP (who assessed) apparently thinks it's fine, too. We got a little railroaded, orriginally we were told the waiting list was 6-8 mos, but then we got an appt in 8 weeks... so we thought we were agreeing to an assessment at 2 yrs, and got one at 19 mos.
Added: based on my understanding of the research, his delay is probably _statistically_ insignificant. That is; his scoring on this exact metric is below average, but kids with similar scores do not score significantly differently from kids with normal 18mo scores at 3 yrs. (which is what I thought, but I wasn't sure I was counting correctly)
-Mich.
clear as mud?
