Sunday, September 11, 2011

Nine Months Ago

After listening to Ava sing the Itsy Bitsy Butterfly, I found myself trying hard to remember what she was like before.

Ava - 21 months old - Childhood Apraxia of Speech before therapy


At 21 months of age, you want most typically developing children to have a spoken vocabulary of at least 10-24 words. By 24 months of age you want to see 50 spoken words and some two-word combinations. You also expect those words to contain almost all vowel sounds and a wide variety of consonants. You would expect a typical history of cooing, laughing, smiling, and babbling as an infant.

Ava did not have a typical history of cooing, laughing, smiling, and babbling as an infant. At 21 months she used no more than 4 different vowel sounds and 3-4 consonant sounds. Her spoken vocabulary at that time is well represented in this video I took one day (11-30-2010 to be exact) while we were reading a story before bed. She had about three words: "de" (that or there), "uh" (used in a variety of ways for emphasis), and "oh no".

I remember taking this video. It was after I had finally accepted that there was a problem and I needed to pursue getting Ava evaluated. I took the video thinking it might be helpful to show it to someone because I knew she often wouldn't "talk" at all in front of strangers. As it turned out, I never used the video for that purpose, but I wanted to share it now. It is a good representation of what Ava's expressive language looked like before we started intervention.



7 comments:

  1. Hi there,
    I don't see the video? I am viewing in google chrome. Can you repost?
    Thanks,
    Kristina

    ReplyDelete
  2. So sorry Christina. It works in Chrome, IE, and Firefox for me so I'm not sure why it isn't for you.

    Can anyone else confirm if they were or were not able to view the video please?

    I'll work on it Christina and let you know if I figure out the problem. Thanks so much for letting me know.

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  3. Ok. I've got it put up in two different ways now. Hopefully that'll help. I'd love some feedback to let me know if it is working for everyone. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The second one works - thanks. We have that book and my Eli loved it when he was smaller. Thanks for sharing.

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  5. Yepp. I feel for you... we've been there, too. You read and read and do everything to encourage language, and they understand everything so well and seem so smart, but they open their mouths and out comes: "duh". It was heartbreaking. When I tried to entice my son to talk, he looked at me so innocently, but also with increasingly obvious helplessness.
    I am so glad these days are over and our kids have been getting the help they need.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Karin - Yes, yes, yes. So glad those early days have passed.

    ReplyDelete
  7. When you say these days have passed, do you mean their speech is now ok? Or they are getting the help they now need?

    ReplyDelete

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