Monday, October 27, 2008

Stuttering


So, besides the whole toe walking thing and afraid of playground equipment and somewhat oversensitivety to textures, there wasn't anything too different that I noticed with MJ. The only other thing was that he stuttered.

We began to really notice this when he began preschool at age 4. The teachers gave us some informative papers on stuttering and said they mentioned him to the speech pathologist.

It wasn't that he was a traditional stutterer. He didn't repeat syllables or get stuck on a word or sound. Instead he would repeat phrases over and over like he couldn't get the whole sentence out. Like he might say:

"Today, today I, today I went, today I went to the store."

We weren't too worried, and the preschool teachers didn't seem too worried either. They said that it was common for preschoolers to start stuttering because they are taking in so much information and learning so fast that there is just so much in their heads and it gets jumbled when it tries to come out by speaking.

So, I didn't worry, and we continued to work with MJ at home as far as stretching his heel chords, and we already knew what foods we could get him to eat.

1 comment:

longonlanguage said...

I know this is an old post but I work with people with Asperger syndrome who demonstrate the behavior you are describing. It is not stuttering but an increase of normal disfluency which are the result of problems with language formulation. You need to ask the speech pathologist to work on helping your child organize their language and assess other speech parameters to make sure he is not also having difficulty integrating breathing and phrasing. Hopefully this problem has resolved itself but if not it will not go away on its own.