Stammering / struggling to find words / dyslexia / anxiety -are they connected?

[hazeyjane]

Dd2 was diagnosed with dyslexia last year, she has struggles with spelling and reading and also has some visual disturbance. She has coloured overlays and reading glasses for convergence issues.

When she was about 2 and a half she saw a SALT weekly for about a year, because of a pronounced stammer, she was a very early talker, with a big vocabulary and spoke in sentences very early. The stammer was blocking individual words, repeating the first letter and big gaps, where she struggled to find a word. It used to upset her a lot, and she got really anxious about this and few other issues. With the SALT we did The Lidcombe Programme, it seemed to work really well, and when she started school SALT stopped and her stammer had disappeared apart from times when she was very anxious or tired.

Recently she has started struggling to find words, she will be telling me a story or about something that happened in the day, and she will just be blocked, with lots of ,uh, um, er, then she will shake her head as though she is trying to get the word out - it is like a stammer, but with the whole sentence getting blocked.

She is bright, funny, creative quirky and very chatty, but can also get very anxious.

Does anyone know if dyslexia and the struggling to find words with speech could be related, or is it a form of stammer? Should I be getting a referral to SALT? I will call SENCO tomorrow, but wondered if anyon has any ideas?

[nonicknameseemsavailable]

It could be a specific word finding difficulty, one of my children has been diagnosed with this recently. it affects speaking, reading and writing (mostly speaking obviously). therapy can help. she was checked for a stammer but it is just her word finding problem. We are seeing a SALT privately, NHS guidelines are very restrictive with who can have therapy so DD wouldn't qualify as she is actually testing with an acceptable score but plainly has a problem, it takes her ages to find the words. Feel free to PM me - not sure I can help any more than this as we are just starting to find out about it but it does help to know you aren't alone.

www.wordfinding.com/WFdiffs.html

this is a link to specific info about how it can present in a classroom environment, worth looking at.