Oh, gee, I never thought of that. SPD is Semantic Pragmatic Disorder. Here is a snippet from one of the few websites I've found about it:
Quote:
The term 'semantic pragmatic disorder' has been around for nearly l5 years. Originally it was only used to describe children who were not autistic.
Features it includes are:-
delayed language development
learning to talk by memorising phrases, instead of putting words together freely
repeating phrases out of context, especially snippets remembered from television programmes
muddling up 'I' and 'you'
problems with understanding questions, particularly questions involving 'how' and 'why'
difficulty following conversations
Children with this disorder have problems understanding the meaning of what other people say, and they do not understand how to use speech appropriately themselves.
Soon both research and practical experience yielded two important findings:
Many people who definitely are autistic have this kind of language disorder.
Most of the children diagnosed as having semantic pragmatic disorder do also have some mild autistic features. For example, they usually have difficulty understanding social situations and expectations, they like to stick fairly rigidly to routines, and they lack imaginative play.
For a while some language therapists maintained there was still an important difference between children with semantic pragmatic disorder and children who were truly autistic. They believed the autistic features seen in children with semantic pragmatic disorder were only a result of their difficulty with language.
Not featured in this article, but also a sign, is that some children with SPD have hyperlexia. I was a very early reader myself, but as far as I know am not autistic. I mention this only because I suspect that whatever genetic influence it was that caused me to be an early reader may be the same one that made my son have this disorder?
Just an example - I had no idea that my son had a problem because when he was 2, he was quoting entire scenes from movies, verbatim, with the intonation and timing of the original scene. I actually thought he was gifted! It was later, when I realized that although he had a huge vocabulary, he never initiated a "conversation". It was all quotes from something else.
To this day, although he is much much better (and he's only 4, so I have high hopes), he cannot answer questions that start with "why".
A good way to understand SPD is this: They have difficulty answering the W questions. Who, what, where, why, when?
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18 Jan 2006, 5:12 pm
