Any late talkers here who started talking after 5 years old?

Post Reply New Topic

I need a little hope today! My 5-year old nonverbal has been receiving speech help since she was 1... but she's still largely non-verbal (she only knows about 5 words, but often refuses to use them), and she won't take to PECS, iPad PECS, or sign language.

Trying the alphabet board and helping her type, but still....

I'd love to hear ANY stories that include someone who learned to speak, type, or communicate in any way after 5 years old. Just one of those days where I've hit a wall and need some uplifting so I can fight the good fight for my little angel.

I think this thread needs to be posted in the parent section of WP.

Non-verbal children on the spectrum develop at different rates with different outcomes. My own 9 yr old daughter was classified as non-verbal at 5 but she goes to mainstream school now and (we discovered) her comprehension was actually good despite her not responding to others. While her speech and communication is nowhere near the proficiency of her peers (there is ongoing catchup) this deficit is offset by her intelligence.

You need to look at your daughter's strengths and interests and work on those, build up her confidence, she's only 5 so there is plenty of time, please don't stress.

Last edited by cyberdad on 03 Oct 2014, 10:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i was a talker at the normal developmental stage

but some words of encouragement, Temple Grandin didnt speak until she was 4, and doctors said she would probably never speak, Einstein also didn't speak until he was 4 neither did my friend and you'd never be able to tell if you spoke to him today, and same with some of my other friends on the spectrum,

keep strong and keep trying with the therapy, when your child is ready, they WILL speak, but not if you give up,

Pediatric research indicates that 70% of all children with severe speech delay at age 4-5 end up with ability to use phrases and 47% end up with fluent speech
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/c ... 31/4/e1128

What is her general severity of autism, receptive language, and intellectual functioning?
Those will affect her learning to speak.
I learned to speak at 8, but my receptive was good since early childhood and intellectual functioning high.
Some children don't learn to speak through traditional speech therapy.
Does your daughter know any words by reading?
Has anyone tried to teach her reading and typing?
Those may be the path to speaking for some autistic children.
And certainly typing will be path to communicate even if she doesn't learn to speak.

One of my closest friends is also on the spectrum. He told me (verbally!) that he didn't really speak almost at all until after he was about 7 or 8 years old. He let his older sibling do any talking for him, and would just point and gesture to things. He said that Silence is his first language. He didn't say what changed to make him talk, but only that he did start talking around 7/8 onwards. I think he said he just decided to start speaking more one day w/o a specific trigger for it - it just kind of happened. While he can be shy and quiet, he speaks just as well or better than anyone else with a full vocabulary. Because he's a bit on the quiet side by nature, he's typically choosier about his words & thus a clear and concise communicator. In private conversation where he's more comfortable speaking, especially when talking about a special interest, he can go on and on like any of us. He's not a big internet user, but he can type just fine. He's just fine using a phone, too. He works some rather social jobs and interacts with customers/guests etc just fine, like anyone else. If my friend never told me that he didn't speak until he was 7 or 8 years old, I'd have never guessed it.

5 may be a significant speech delay, but it's certainly not too late for someone to still develop a broad & complete ability to communicate with everyone else in the world around them.

A little bit more details from your part would help.

Is your daughter also hyperactive, or have difficulty focusing on static hand-drawn pictures? Have you ever tried to draw pictures (stick figures) for your daughter and communicate with her that way?

All children with autism I have met are visual, no exception. However, there are two types of them. One type uses video memory in their brains, another type uses picture memory. Those are their natural talent points, and development should start from their strongest points. By focusing too much on social and speech development, the lives of all too many children on the spectrum have been ruined.

Try to "talk" to your daughter by using video clips (if she is a video-memory person) or hand-drawn pictures (if she is a picture-memory person). Check out my book's website for two samples video clips I have used to communicate with my son. If she still cannot focus on stick figures, let me know and I will describe the technique to transition her from her favorite video clips, so to teach her to focus on stick figures. (It's all discussed in the book.)

Talking can wait. To me, visual-manual skills should be your focus. Both of my children learned to read before they learned to talk. Today, knowing what I know, I would even encourage children on the spectrum to identify letters and start to read real words early on. Talking should have never been a point of concern for children on the spectrum. You develop the visual-manual skills of these children first, and talking and socialization will come naturally, by themselves. As paradoxical as this may seem, by focusing only on social and speech development, people actually end up delaying the development of these skills for these children.

Identify first whether your daughter is video type person or picture type person, then you'll be able to communicate to her, in her native language.

Regards,

Jason

Temple Grandin states, that there are three different types of dominant thinking style in autism, the visual thinkers.the music and math thinkers (means thinking in patterns, where I still do not really grasp what is meant by this as I am unable to do any math as I cannot visualize the manipulation of numbers, though I did learn more than 1000digits of pi as I can vizualize that (the order of the numbers), and the verbal thinkers.
I did talk before the age of 5, but from what you write I identify with having a video memory.
edit to add: I am very good at painting from an early age on, about age 3 to 4 I started to paint in perspective.

Temple just throws out some broad-stroke classifications of people with autism, without any underlying theory or model of how human brain works.

"Pro-picture" and "pro-video" are names to help people remember the proper techniques to communicate with these children. But in the book you will find the real explanation of their brain memory storage. Pro-video children store processes, pro-picture children store concepts. As explained by my brother-in-law to me, pro-video people have the uncanny "fractal" storage system inside their brains, that allows them to "zoom in" at any point and retrieve sub-processes for finer and finer details. And they can zoom in and zoom in, ad infinitum. I am a pro-picture person, but frankly I admire the pro-video brain a lot more. As I say in the book, pro-video people have a beautiful mind.

Temple's (c) verbal thinker, is pro-picture, and store concepts by default. Temple's (b) math or music thinker is pro-video, and stores processes by default. Temple's (a) visual thinker, is actually split into pro-video and pro-picture. Groups (b) and (c) exist simply because these people were deprived of visual development in their early childhood. I am probably a good example of someone that crossed from (a) to (c), in Temple's scheme. Roughly speaking, before I was 17 years old, I did not use any language to think (I spoke three). After 17, I switched to use languages for my thinking. All that being said, both Temple and yourself are clearly on the pro-video side.

If you understand a bit of calculus, pro-video and pro-picture are like "Fourier Transforms" in the phase space of information storage. For that reason, I see two and only two possible types of autism.

Regards,

Jason

Jason,
thanks for the reply.
I identify with the zooming in into smaller and smaller details.
But this makes me very aloof to the outside world, because it feels like I have one pair of eyes, which is constantly visually obseriving what's going on in my inside mind, and my physical pair of eyes need to stay in touch with the outside world, but the attention to the inside is bigger.
Or:
When the psychologist asks me: how was your week? my mind rewinds to the beginning of the week to play the video to see, what was going on and then when I start with seeing how I fed my cats I might zoom in into one or I follow him for example going outside and sink into this film in my mind, or something different and later forgot what the psychologist was asking me, but she got aware of it now and said she will not ask this kind of questions again.
She also uses painting with me, that I paint instead of talk, because sometimes it is much easier to give a quick drawing than a verbal explanation.
I can go through the house in my mind I lived in from age 2 to 8 and literally see everything like for example even the tiles from the floor.

It is interesting what you write, thank you.

.

I do not understand "concepts", in these forums there were already discussions about types of thinking and I do not understand "thinking in concepts".

I think most people can zoom in to smaller and smaller details, but many people can't hold a lot of details at the same time.
I hate watching videos.

I don't remember when I started talking but I still until today pronounce some words wrong sometimes

I dislike watching TV with humans involved in plots because I cannot follow.

Is that for autism only or for all kids?

I guess I am in the 47 percent and my mom acts like it's a miracle how far I have gotten. I can remember her telling me when I was 13, "you have only been talking for nine years and look how well you can speak." As if other kids don't talk as well after they start talking late.

EDIT: I just checked the link and it looks like it's only for ASD and since my reason for a severe language delay was because of hearing loss so I am probably out of the percentage group and don't count.

I was100% nonverbal up til around 5 and then only monosyllabic until about 9. And even now am still basically nonverbal, but I can talk. Mostly I use gestures like nodding and shrugging and make sounds like "uh huh". As for communicating through typing goes, these are my post count faces from other forums. As you can see I have become verrrry verbal in that regard Voice talking isn't everything.

This is really interesting to hear. My daughter has started to switch from 2-3 word phrases to full sentences at between 8-9 yrs of age. I'm not sure exactly when it all switched over? She's still classified as largely non-verbal at school but at least now everyone knows she understands everything.