Words - the Final Frontier.

My Small Boy is now very much in favour of words. He understands the power of them. In fact, he believes in the power of them a little too much. So we get conversations like:

"Can't go to the playground. It's wet and raining."

"No. Is actually not wet playground. Is wet inna house. Playground is dry."

There is a little corner of his mind that is telling him that if he insists hard enough that the playground is dry, the playground will in fact become dry. And the house - which he can see clear enough is not, in fact, wet at this point - will become wet in its place. Basically, he believes in primitive nature magic. Sadly, it's not quite working out for him. He needs to work on his incantations a little.

His belief in the power of [em]my[/em] speech is a little closer to the mark. After all, if he can induce me to say important words like (not-so-random example) "Time to play Minecraft* now" then it's true, this will actually turn it into Minecraft playing time.

It does not, however, follow that taking my lower jaw and moving it up and down will cause me to say the magic words. Apparently worth trying as an experiment though.

The biggest roadblock for the Small Boy at the moment, is the problem of conflicting labels. See that cat in front of you? It's also an animal. And a pet. That roast potato? That's food. Also dinner. Trying to keep things simple, he has an intense aversion to this concept. No! Is NOT dinner! Issa tater! This is probably what's behind the whole "Yourcraft" confusion too. How can "mine" be a word for a hole in the ground? It's already the word for something that belongs to me.

Learning about grouping things - people, animals, foods, clothes - is an important abstract task. Important for being able to sort out and categorise and organise your world too.

Ah! Organisation! That sounds like a whole blog post in itself...



* Logically enough, Minecraft is only Minecraft to the Small Boy when he's playing it. When somebody else is playing, it's "YourCraft". Or "Rachel's Craft" or "Daddy's Craft". After a fair amount of time spent laboriously pointing out the difference between mine, yours, his and hers, I can hardly complain!

Words - the continuing story

So this is what I learned about promoting language development at the "zero to one word" stage - it's not necessarily about knowing the words. In fact, the Small Boy had previously been using a number of words and phrases before he was two, and then stopped for months. Things like "onna bike", "back door", "juice", "breakfast". And he responded appropriately to a lot more than he said ("this way". "Follow Daddy". "Time for jamas". "Brush teeth") and I'm sure understood the meaning of a lot of words that he didn't need to particularly respond to.


And yet, he wasn't using these words. Why not?


One thing I now believe about this stage of language development is that the crucial hurdle he needed to get over was confidence. His life was filled with people - mum, dad, big sisters - using all these complicated phrases at him. And for "complicated", read "two or three words". We thought we were making things nice and simple for him. Not nearly simple enough.


The message from us to him for this next phase, simply stated was this - you CAN communicate with just one word at a time, if that's all you've got. You're allowed to. Really. Look. Observe...


Daniel.


Daniel?


Juice?


Juice!


Hmmm. Cup.


There! Cup.


Pour. Juice!


Hmmmm. Lid.


Lid?


There! Lid!


Juice. Tasty.


Book?


Book.


Sit.


Book.


(read read read read)


The End.


Again?


(read read read read)


The End.


Again?


(How many times can you read the same picture book over again before you go insane? Well, it turns out I can do at least 'a couple of dozen a day for six weeks or so.' More than that, I wouldn't like to promise. Let me say, I am now really solidly grounded on what the wheels on the bus do. Apparently, they go round and round. ALL day long)


One of my favourite things from this stage was working out all the non-verbal ways he had of communicating things with us. There was the old "bring the juice bottle" trick. That was fairly straightforward. Less obvious - going to the garden to get two sticks (one for him, one for me). That meant "lets go for a walk" (and trail our sticks on the ground). And pretty soon, the words started to come back. More. Juice. Bear. Train. No.


And of course, the big favourite. AGAIN.


Again?

Words, and how to get them.

In August of last year, as I may have mentioned before, the Small Boy was using two "words". They were "no" and "oh no." That was not much of an achievement for a kid of nearly three (and was considerably down from the count we'd had some six - nine months earlier)


These days, he communicates verbally about all sorts of things. Not very easily - I can see his little brain going chug chug chug at very simple questions. He doesn't like questions much - they come on someone else's schedule. But an exchange like "How old are you?" (*think* *think* *think*) "Are you three?" (....) "Are you four?" "Yes! I four!" still makes me smile, considering that even a few weeks ago the answer to that would have been to hide his head in my armpit.


How did we get from there to here? One of the things that brought us was the "It takes two to talk" program from The Hanen Centre. I fell in love with this book the first time we used it - full of devastatingly simple, obvous-after-the-fact insights that just worked. We used this in conjunction with Speech Therapy, getting a photocopied chapter to take home with us after each session. That's probably somewhat illegal, considering I think we ended up with about a third of the book, so I won't mention the name of our Speechies, even though they're great too.


At the beginnng, it didn't even look like "speech" therapy. We just played with toys in the therapist's office on the floor. But with one important twist.


"You're showing him how to play with the toy", said the therapist." That's great. You're showing him really nicely. But Stop It! Stop showing him. Look and see what HE does."

It was a box of magnetic people, in halves. Clearly the aim was to mix and match the halves to put different leg halves together with the top halves. He was ignoring both bits. He was sticking the box on his head and using it as a hat.

"Ok. Now you do the same."

Small Boy with box on head. Mumma with box lid on head. Box falls off. Lid falls off. Small Boy laughs. And then...

"Did you see that?" He looked you straight in the eye. AND he looked ME straight in the eye too. He's looking for our reactions. He's engaged. Now do it again."

And we did it again. And again. (that's a bit of a theme with the Small Boy). After a while, we added some language ("Up!"). And we did it again. And again...

(To Be Continued...)

The Power of Yes

The Power of Yes is this week's new discovery in Small Boy Land. It's a little thing, but it makes me smile greatly. Within a few days the answer to "Would you like a sandwich?" has gone from


"Like a sandwich


to


"Yes, like a sandwich"


to just


"YES!"


He pronounces it with great relish, and is clearly very impressed with his new discovery. It's versatile! It's efficient! It decreases the number of words he has to produce to get his message across! Win - win - win.


Inconveniently, however, it does come at just the time when I'd realised I could use his echolalia to promote good manners. I was formerly having some success in prompting "Like a sandwich please mumma?". Now that conversation is going something like this:


"Sandwich!"


"Sandwich please mumma?".


"YES!"


Small price to pay. With that big grin on his face, how could I deny him?

Auditory Processing Fail?

I have recently realised something about auditory processing. Apparently, I'm kind of crap at it.Perhaps.


This links back to a longstanding ... mmm ... difference of opinion between myself and the Spouse over my "not listening" to things. As in, we're sitting down side by side at our respective his 'n hers computers, me watching iView and him playing WoW and chatting away to his guildies. And then he'll say:


"mmmbl mmmblbl mm mmm mbl"


And I'll say:


"..."


Because, of course, I'm watching my program. I don't know what he's said to me. I'm barely even aware words came out of his mouth. In fact, I've always considered it extremely weird that he would expect that I would automatically know that he just said something to me (as opposed to the guildies) - obviously I can't be listening to him at the same time as listening to my TV program. You can't be listening to two things at once, can you?


Can you?


Well apparently, according to a big involved conversation we had on this topic, you can. Or at least I can't but maybe you can.
Apparently, all this time when we've been pursuing our respective evening's entertainments, the Spouse has been chatting with his guildies AND listening to my program AND processing the content of both of these AT THE SAME TIME!


Frankly, this blew me away. I would never have remotely considered that this would be possible. When I'm listening to a thing, I'm listening to ONE thing. My ears are totally tuned to that. Other noise doesn't even register. And if I'm not actively listening to something, I'm not in processing mode at all. Come and say something to me out of the blue and you'll have to wait for the system to boot up before you'll get any meaningful answer.


The question then arises of course - who's normal and who's weird? Am I unusually crap at this task, or is he unusually good?


I was online recently with a person who really does have full-on auditory processing disorder. From his account, he has the worst of both worlds. He can't filter out an auditory input to effective non-existance, but he also can't process more than one at the same time. So multiple people talking at once leaves him with a confused meaningless jumble, nothing to catch hold of.


Which brings us back (of course) to the Small Boy. Is this possibly the source of his language difficulties? Has he inherited neither his dad's ability to process multiple sound channels at once nor his mum's ability to switch focus and filter out the excess?


Complicating this also is the fact that I'm not sure that what I do with filtering sound is really the sort of thing you inherit. It's more a sort of trick I've picked up to make sound more manageable. Problem - I've no real idea how exactly I do it. I've no idea how or when I learnt to do it. I've no idea how to teach it to someone else.

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.

Peenamite Dynamite

The Small Boy's diction has always been excellent. Even back in September when he was only saying two things, ever ("no" and "oh no"), though there might not have been many of them, the words themselves were perfectly clear. It is absolutely adorable to hear him meticulously and correctly pronouncing "watermelon", "motorbike" or "dinosaur" (to name three favourite things).

There is just one exception to this principle. Vegemite, in Small Boy land, should be pronounced "Peenamite". And I have Absolutely No Idea why. Is it halfway between Vegemite and Peanut Butter? Perhaps. But he doesn't eat peanut butter. He certainly recognises the word "Vegemite" when it's used to him. Occasionally he experiments with the 'V' word ("Vege-ge-mite onna sandwich!"). But basically the alternate seems to have stuck in his mind now as The Way It Is Said, and apparently nothing is getting it out.