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Is your autistic child verbal?
ash2
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DS is 18 months and so far, does not have any words. He barely babbles at all, but will occasionally make sounds like, "ma ma ma ma." He just started speech therapy so I know it will take time, but I can't help but wonder if he will ever speak. The doctors all tell me that he is too young for them to say, but that they think he will talk, just be significantly delayed. If your child is verbal, how old were they when it began? Did they babble and make lots of sound as an infant/toddler?
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Re: Is your autistic child verbal?
My son did babble but it phased out and by 18 months old he was only grunting or crying. A few months before his 3rd d-day was a hard time for me, I finally accepted that he wasn't just going to snap out of it, that we would have a long hard road ahead of us and that he may never really be verbal. I put him in an intensive program and worked really hard at learning and teaching him signs (which he loved). We also got a working dx of Apraxia in addition to ASD.
And then the week before his 3rd b-day he just started talking. One day he said "uh-oh" all that day (had never happened before) the next day he kept saying "uh-oh" and added "hop", the day after he kept the first 2 words and added "up" and "down". It was amazing, I had finally accepted that it wouldn't happen, and then it did. I mostly credit the signing, I also think maturity had something to do with it.
He's 5 now and has age appropriate language skills(actually a bit beyond age level when he was last tested!), still has trouble with articulation. It still amazes me, he just started talking 2 years ago.
I think every kid just looks so different that it is hard to compare.
My 6 y.o. has AS. He started talking very early. He has only ever mispronounced a handful of words from the day that he started speaking. By the time he was about 18-20 months old, he was literally talking to us in paragraphs. It was unreal.
My 2 y.o. was evaluated at 16 months by EI. At that time, he was almost two standard deviations behind the norm. He barely talked and had regressed from when he was 15 months and did some babbling and said some words. He then begin to pick up words pretty quickly, but we soon realized that his language was almost entirely echolalia. Within the past two months he has made some huge breakthroughs. He is speaking in sentences, using people's names to get their attention, and breaking away from his echolalia. We just had him evaluated, one year later, and his expressive language skills are actually scoring above the norm by a few months. His social, non-verbal and receptive are still behind, but we are definitely making progress.
Yes. If anything, she chatters. But a lot of it is repetitive/scripted/echolalic, although it is improving.
She started talking and hitting verbal milestones at the typical times, and we used sign language with her as well. But she was always on the slow end of normal for number of words, until eventually -- around 2.5, I'd guess -- that fell into actual delay.
Her verbal development was odd, though -- like, her verbal explosion didn't come until 21 months instead of 18, and then instead of getting a ton of everyday words, she busted out with knowing the entire alphabet & being able to identify them by sight.
DD1, 1/5/2008 ~~~ DD2, 3/17/2010
My 6 year old was verbal early; had words around 10 months. He didn't put phrases together until around 2.5 though. He didn't get his PDD_NOS diagnosis until this past summer at 5 years and 10 months. My 4 year old is also verbal. He didn't start talking until around 2 and had about 10 words until around 3. Now at 4 he's quite talkative.
As far as them both babbling, Jon did and had what we refer to as "twin speak" with his brother until around 4. Chris, not so much. He had not really many vocalizations. He did make some noise but not much.