Light bulb moment

I hope I don't have to pay Dr. Phil every time I use that, but it's the easiest way to describe how things clicked for me when I watched Dr. Temple Grandin's lecture. At about 00:02:43 she describes auditory issues in kids with ASDs. Even though auditory threshold ("hearing") is normal, their ability to hear auditory detail can be impaired. In addition to apraxia, I think that this may be part of why Jesse has such trouble with speech. One of the reasons I think this is because of his animal sounds. He makes the sounds for dog, cat, duck, and bear. But he drops the first part of each sound. Instead of "woof" it's "oof." So instead of "meow" it's "ow." Instead of "quack quack" it's "ack ack." Instead of "roar" it's "argh."

Here's a video to demonstrate what I mean. This was taken at the beginning of January of this year, just before Jesse's 2nd birthday.



The words that he has right now that start with a hard consonent sound (i.e. "mom," "da," "baby") are words that we've worked a lot on and enunciated the hell out of to try to get him to repeat. He has a lot of trouble acquiring words...a lot of trouble with consonant sounds. For example, he says "asu" for "thank-you."

Of course, I could be completely off the mark here and this might not be an issue at all. Either way, I hope that Jesse's new SLP can give us the tools to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of Jesse being able to communicate with us.

And I thought I'd throw this in here...just because he's cute as hell: