Sooo.... DH's letter.... WORLKED!!!!!
Like a dream!
Not only did she send his scores (which she had refused to give me, maybe just because she hadn't calculated them, but basically she felt I didn't need to know), BUT she ALSO SENT A FREAKING JOURNAL REFERENCE!!!!!!!!
I'm floored. I would NEVER have gotten a response like that. Hand it to DH, PhD I guess
Now the reference may not say what she thinks it says: In a nutshell, it says
1) don't evaluate 'till 24 mos, it's not meaningful
2) almost everyone late at 24 mos "catches up" by 7 yrs but there is a tiny corelation between late onset talking and later gramatical deficits... tiny gramatical deficits which they explicity say can't necesarily be termed "speech impairments"
3) almost everyone who doesn't catch up is female.
4) that there needs to be more research on interventions, as it is not clear if they have any effect. Some of their data point to a strong genetic effect, but they don't state that in so many words.
BUT... there's a THIRD thing...
In the midst of everything else, there is a HINT. And the hint is that the people who designed one of the possible interventions have a different approach, which they arrived at through what appears to have been empiricle research. They target early sentance formation for therapy, rather than vocablulary building. Now. DS is *not* impaired in sentance formation at this point, *however* I am 100% willing to engage in any technique I can think of that might encourage sentance formation, and I think DS would enjoy that... it's his kinda thing.
So... *if* (and right now it looks like this is not the case) that programme does follow these principles faithfully, we will take it. If not, we will research it, and talk to the SLP about our intent to use some of the techniques ourselves.
RE: explosion at 20 mos.
One of the studies I looked at described a general tendency to a smooth progression of language devt, with a subset of kids who have a genuine "explosion." DS has more than doubled his vocabluary (including onomatopoea, words, signs, etc) in less than a week. That might be what we're seeing too... too early to tell.
Eek... he's woken up and is trying to help me type....
-Mich
