I, you, he,she

Pronouns are something the Small Boy has always had problems with. He does the classic autistic echolalia thing of repeating what you said straight back to you. As in:

"Do you want some toast?"

"You want some toast."

That means "yes".

Actually, a more usual answer would be "want some toast", with the "you" left out completely. Clearly he feels that pronouns are tricky and unreliable, and should be avoided wherever possible. Or at least, he did feel that.

On the subject of echolalia, a quick digression. I divide his echolalia into two categories - meaningful echolalia and non-meaningful. The non-meaningful is straight out quoting from TV or other places, context-free. He does a bit of that (though usually when he's quoting he acts it out as well, so I tend to class that as rudimentary pretend play) but more often it's meaningful, as in:

"Do want your book?"

"Not want your book!"

The meaning is fairly clear, but the form of the words is echolalic. He's using my words as a kind of structure to hang his own sentence off - probably because it's infinitely easier for him to recognise a word and its meaning when presented to him than it is to call up the word itself from memory.

This week, however, he's suddenly jumped to "Not want MY book". And "Mummy, you draw a airplane". And "Not in my jamas and bed". Over the course of about two or three days. He's still definitely avoiding pronouns, but now on the rare occasions that he uses them, they're generally being correct.

This is huge, and I have to think that it has implications for developing self-other knowledge and theory of mind. Understanding that when I speak I say I and when you speak you say I is half way to realising that you are a person, and I am a person, and we both have equal and separate points of view, which put us at the centres of our own worlds. And when you understand that, you're ready to be a part of society.

Little Scientist

Ever get the feeling your kid is experimenting on you?

Back around the "just gone three" mark, when the Small Boy's words could still be counted on your fingers, I was continually on the lookout for signs that he understood one particular word or another. The aim was identifying individual words - there were a number of long(-ish) word strings that he clearly understood the meanings of, but extracting the specific units of meaning within those sentences was something that may or may not have been happening. So I would watch closely for signs of understanding, and set up word games to try to test his knowledge.

One of these I remember quite clearly. It was called "Where's Bear" and was played with a cast of a) Bear and b) Wombat

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Bear}

"Look! Bear! There's Bear! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Wombat}

"Yes! Wombat!"

... and so on and so on. That was pretty much the whole game, which could go on for about fifteen minutes (which is actually rather a long time to get excited about two stuffed toys being raised ten cm multiple times). The above was the ideal - in fact the game frequently went more like this:

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Wombat}

"No! That's not Bear. That's Wombat! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Bear}

"No! That's not Wombat."

So, totally useless from the point of view of testing his knowledge - except that I knew for a fact that he most certainly did know which of them was Bear and which was Wombat. This was Bear the Beloved, Companion of the Bedtime ... not know Bear? Impossible! And besides, he had that look in his eyes. I was busy testing him, but he'd turned it right around and was testing me. Hmmm... she said 'Bear' - what will she do if I hold up the wombat instead? Ooh! That was interesting! Lets do it again!

Of course, this has implications for IQ and language development testing, where they do just that - present him with a variety of options and ask him to identify which is which. Since he had absolutely zero motivation to identify objects correctly just because someone has asked him to, he won't. It's much more fun to identify them incorrectly, and see what your tester's reaction is.

Now that I have a Talking Small Boy, I've pretty much given up on the language testing thing. Current scheme is terribly scientific - does it "look like" he understands? If so, keep on going.

It's not the testing that matters, it's the skills. As long as the skills are developing, I can live with the uncertainty of not really knowing excatly how fast.