This is an interesting thread to me!
DS12 has trouble pulling words out of his head when he's speaking. You have to be very patient waiting for him to say what he's going to say, and you can just see his mind working to organize his thoughts. It's like he knows what he wants to say but is constantly searching for the right way to say it. He'll even correct himself in the middle and restate it in a better way. It got a little better when he started Adderall for ADHD-Inattentive type, I think because he's able to focus a bit better. But he just has trouble.
It also manifests itself when he's supposed to write anything in school. His first response is always, "I don't know" or to just use as few words as possible to get his gist across. While I know to ask him follow-up questions to draw his thoughts out more (and he almost always knows his facts well and has something more-than-adequate to say), his teachers just assume he doesn't know the answer or doesn't have any thoughts on the topic. For instance, when he writes papers, he'll write very basic sentences (often misspelled, often with bad captitalization). But if I ask him to explain why he said something (and I type it while he says it) he has more complex thoughts and can always explain his reasoning. When he took the WISC last year, in talking to the psych, I know that he often just said, "I don't know" or gave the shortest possible answer when really he knew much more than he was saying. Unfortunately, the psych just saw it as him not knowing the answers and scored accordingly. Interestingly, when DS scored at "college level" (13+) on story recall, which is in line with what we see at home, the psych dismissed the score as inaccurate.
Does this sound like ELD? He also has a history of many repeat ear infections as a younger child. While he's never been assessed for CAPD, he has some signs of it, but seems to learn very well when read to and fairly well when he's in class. He's never had any problems passing hearing tests, even when he had all the ear infections. He also has some signs of dyslexia, but they're more of the substituting words type than the reversing letters type.
We'd love to do something to help him and have tried any number of times to get people to look more closely at what we've seen, but since he's average, they just think we're looking for something that's not there. They don't even take into account that he has a family full of HG people and he's the only one not performing at a high level.
