Easter Seals Disability Services

A Speech Therapist tells the following story:

Tiny Baby Doll

I first met this little girl early in 2008 - when she was 18 months old; an Occupational Therapist and I evaluated her for eligibility for the program and we were so charged because she was very tiny with long black curly hair and huge brown eyes.  She had had a number of physical ailments at and since birth, had several surgeries and truly had not grown much.  However, despite her start, she had made enough gross and fine motor gains that she was just within average for those skills.  Her language skills were delayed and we felt that a Special Instructor could begin working with her to help her with play and interaction skills.  I was asked to return to the family about 4 months later and assess her language again.  Although she had made other gains, she was not talking or babbling much.... she vocalized "ba" and "da" for all occasions.

We worked and worked again...she was always very attentive and hated to see me take my bag of toys; she would often point to the door when I said it was time to go and then go and sit on my bag with her arms crossed.  Months passed; I was pretty sure she had either apraxia of speech (a neuromotor speech disorder) or a severe phonological disorder.  But which??  I looked over and over for the signs of both and worked on sequencing sounds to form into words.  by the time she was nearing 3 years old, her expressive language began to blossom.  She had been producing a number of consonants in isolation (i.e., without a vowel sound afterward) and started to produce a number consonant-vowel combinations besides "ba" and "da" such as /ma/ /me/ /mo/ /ga/ /ge/ /go/).  Since vowels weren't distorted I thought we were looking at a phonological disorder, much easier to mitigate.  Three years old came and she began to add final consonants to her utterances, making real words.  Hallelujah!!

We still have a long way to go with this our little baby doll but every time I see her she has made some gains.  Unless you are very attentive to language acquisition, you don't realize how each little sound has to be recognized and then imitated and then added to a string of other sounds to become words.  Noam Chomsky says we are "hard-wired" to acquire language.  Thank God for that because if we weren't it would be WAY too difficult!!