A question for Lingle and wise posters on here

[Dev9aug]

You posted sole time ago in a thread that "extreme musicality can sometimes hinder development of functional language" I cannot remember which thread it was but I think you were speaking from experience. Apologies if that is not the case.

Can I please ask what did you mean and how did you develop functional language? I fear we are treading a similar path where ds1(3.5, dx ASD, currently Pre verbal) prefers to keep humming tunes in his own world rather than engage with us. TIA

Have no idea if there is a documented link but will watch this with interest. My dd2 has the attention span of a gnat, hx of severe language probs yet if you sing her an 8-bar melody she has never heard before she can sing it right back, with 100% accuracy. So am interested in the idea of a link here.

Handywoman x

Yep ds1 (now 13 non-verbal) could sing perfectly in tune at 18 months. Part of his regression was to stop saying 'dar' for star and start humming twinkle twinkle instead.

I'm not sure it hinders language development as such, but there is an association between perfect pitch and autism traits - interesting recent paper here:

www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0037961

Lucy Blackman (adult now, non-verbal but types) has written about her singing when she was little in her book Lucy's Story www.goodreads.com/book/show/343848.Lucy_s_Story (weirdly ds1 also used to sing old macdonald when cross!)

Something like intensive interaction or Floortime would help you use the singing to engage your ds1 and use it to lead to interaction. (DS1 used to/still does a bit shut up if anyone joined him in singing - but Lucy's book explained why)

I have just remembered we used to attend a toddler group run by a lovely lady who had an awful singing voice ? tuneless and gruff. This woman used to lead the nursery rhymes on the carpet at the end of the session. Everyone would join in but dd2 would screw her face up, complain about the singing and ask to go home! She is fiercely musical and recently started whistling non-stop (literally non-stop).

Ha ha, yes ds1 still stops us singing if we're out of tune.

dd1 was/is another extremely musical ASDer. she sang before she could talk, and hummed when she couldn't work out the words/articulate them. It used to drive me bonkers trying to work out what new tune she had picked up at nursery (I know the obvious ones, but she came home with a real variety!) so that I could learn it too, and try to help her with the words.

for a long while, when she was 3/4ish, we went with it. it was one of the very few things she wanted to do, and at least she had an interest in something. we used it to work on other skills - eg, we borrowed a tape machine with a pressure switch from Portage, and worked on her cognitive skills - push the plate and the music plays, walk away and it doesn't. this also helped me out as I had not long had dd2, and couldn't be at her beck and call so to have her accessing her music independently was a bonus.

dd1 used to sing/talk using only the 'dar' syllable too - intonation and tune told us all we needed to know for quite some time!

we worked on singing (or humming, if I couldn't work out the words!) together, or singing alternate lines. I used her current obsession song wise to try to interest her in other areas - eg painting stars while singing "twinkle twinkle', or finding bells to ring while singing Frere Jacques. when she showed that she was trying to articulate the words, we tried to work on finessing her pronunciation (and looked up associated oral exercises to work on each syllable. to be blunt, we were lucky in this - dd1 did most of the owrk herself, using mirrors/windows, and she/we were lucky it paid off)

agree with Saintly that floortime/intensive interaction type exercises helped us a lot (we were instinctively playing this way with dd1), so again, we used a toy star (for eg) to play 'put the star on the...' - either furniture, coloured spots on the floor, body parts/people (eg 'on daddy's head', 'on mummy's arm' etc).

dd1 also loved posting, so we had a stack of laminated cards, and a toy postbox (the elc one is really quite sturdy!), and she had to point out the right coloured star, or try to say the colour, or say the number of stars, before she got to post it.

obviously the later activities came once she would entertain the notion of doing something other than singing - the singing/storybook only phase lasted a loooooooong time.

I did say a while back I would try to look out some progressional videos of dd1 learning speech/perfecting her pronunciation. I will do that now life has calmed down a bit with ds, and will link you when I have done so.

btw, all this is still very much a work in progress - dd1 still has phases where she won't sing with anyone else (can't blame her if it's me singing !), or where she won't even sing out loud, or where she will only sing with others...

she has finally left her Adele phase behind - now to get her to give up Christmas carols!

DD is a musical speech delayed, possibly ASD who knows, 3.4 year old. She can sing beautifully, gets very angry if you play tunes in the wrong key, and doesn't really like most people singing with her. I'm generally ok, but have basically perfect pitch. OH not so much, although he's the professional! She's fine for her little brother to join in though, and he's not very tuneful at all.

Anyway, we do a lot of call and answer stuff with her, she sings one line, I sing the next etc, and she learns lyrics by watching my mouth very closely. She's not great at picking up words when she can't see the person singing them, so carols she's learnt from CDs tend to be basically vowel sounds and la la la, but songs I've taught her have most of the words right. She's particularly fond of repetitive songs like This Old Man and She'll be coming round the mountain. We sing a verse of 'singing I Yi Yippee Yippee I' in between every different verse so that she can always join in on the 'chorus' if she doen't know the words to the different verse. It helps to keep her engaged. I started by singing the song and leaving out one word at a time to see if she would fill it in. She could sing some nursery rhymes at twenty months or so, but she won't do it on request. Heads, shoulders, knees and toes also very popular. If your DS can read a bit, there are some fab singalonga Disney books in Tesco for £3 at the moment, and DD has been loving sitting with me and listening to the CD while I point to the words.

Hi Dev,

This is the first post I made on this board in September 08 when he'd turned 3.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/behaviour_development/600616-is-ds2-s-musicality-hindering-his-speech-development. If you're reading it with your own child in mind, bear in mind that I wildly overestimated DS2' vocabulary and abilities in the first post - you'll see I open up more as it goes along thanks to the tact of others on this board. He did not recognise his own name at that time, nor did he at 3.5.

So you can see at the beginning there was quite a lot of musical turn-taking, harmonising together... I think his brother and I were allowed "in" more than other people because we both have extreme perception of relative pitch (harmonies) though neither of us have any absolute pitch perception or extreme timbral perception. But when we were trying out functional language, any turn of phrase, any rhyme, might "tip" DS2 back into a known or new tune. So music had initially been useful, but now it was looming too large in his brain and stopping him from moving to the next (next for him) stage of communication.

I think I was too polite to say it, but after the thread I was even more convinced that he'd reached a stage where we had to separate out musical patterns from communicating functionally. I remember banning Dr Seuss, banning anything with rhymes from his bedtime reading and going back to one-word-per-page books. Go Dog Go was alright. I see I updated in November 2008 to say that things had got better after I withdrew music from his life, save for in the car.

I think from your thread you might want to get to the stage of tossing the music back and forth with each other and the child letting you join in before you think about it blocking the next step. So, as others have said, you need to "break in". Do you know about Floortime?

As to the whys - I think that extreme musicality is about extreme pattern recognition ability; I think autism is about unbalanced pattern recognition ability. I think that as you're developing, if one kind of pattern recognition is already developed beyond your ability to communicate about it, then it risks becoming a bit of an "island" of ability.

I'm now interested in the clumsiness with which we adults try to "break in" to join in with musical children with poor communication. We don't respect absolute pitch (NT adults with absolute pitch find "wrong keys" just as painful as autistic children do). We don't respect the fact that their perception of correct harmonies may be advanced, and that they might gladly sing with us if we could do it correctly enough not to be distracting. We don't respect their ability to move from the end of one song to the next using the correct harmonic progression. So I think we could do better "breaking in" if we paid very close attention to the kind of musicality the child is showing - if a child lived for producing colourful art, you wouldn't choose an art therapist with colour-blindness to help. But many of us adults aren't great at audiating and holding music in our heads, so we are very clumsy, and the poor child draws back further.

Just to add, the professional shorthand "concrete than abstract" doesn't help. A child with extreme abilities may be engaging in abstract musical reasoning - holding a whole symphony in his/her head in the way most adults can't. If we could accept that rather than dismissing it as maternal fantasy. Fixed techniques for teaching music aren't going to help either if the child is already ahead of the teacher in many ways (I had Kodaly pushed at me - but in my family we don't need to turn notes into visual or physical signs in order to sense tonality - it's not our tonality that we need to improve, it's our visual skills!).

sorry, more musings...

sometimes I think that children with extreme musicality and communication problems retreat into music because they still get to experience the "that's what life's all about" feelings. So they experience tension and resolution - sometimes in quite sophisticated and fulfilling ways, through their musical experience rather than through their relationships.

Thanks everyone, I am out and about so have not been able to reply. Will respond once I have read the responses properly, lots to think about.

yy re:the "musicality" being a form of pattern recognition. With my DS, it manifested as being spookily good at jigsaws and "telly talk" - ie reproducing chunks of telly script/books etc, but as self-soothing echolalia, rather than as communication often. I think it's human nature (not just for kids with developmental delays!) to focus on what we find easy, and shirk what we find difficult. I think it can be a bit of a vicious circle - child struggles with language, is good at jigsaws, obsesses on jigsaws/toy cars etc. I agree with the trying to break in and share some of the interests, to try and vary the pattern a bit, but some v interesting thoughts from lingle re:sometimes lack of parental musical ability!

though sometimes it's unpredictable what will benefit rather than hinder a child - I remember when I saw first trailers for In The Night Garden, I cringed, thinking that it would inspire echolalia - mikka/makka moo on a loop BUT it helped my DS develop pretend play round bedtime routines!

Oh interesting merlin.

I remember when ds1 was about 17/18 months the Sydney olympics were on TV. It had a belting theme tune (Pavrottti iirc) and ds1 used to stop, go rigid and shake when it was on. It had a very physical effect on him. Classical music seems to do that a lot to ds1 - and there's a fine line between him being able to tolerate it or it simply being too much. It's hard to explain, and harder to imagine what it must be doing, but the effect is very visible.

Saintly we have been doing ABA for a while now. We started off with RIT which is similar to floortime, then moved on, We took a break from ABA a few weeks ago and this is where he seemed to have a developmental surge where his receptive language skills improved and he started echoing nursery rhymes etc. we are currently doing some intensive interaction before we start ABA again. This developmental surge happened after we started him on supplements and went GF/DF.

Silverfrog I wish ds1 would stay still long enough for me to take a video, so I could upload it and get your views. Incidentally what triggered his echolalia is the DVD's you recommended 'singing hands'. Before it, he had no words, but now he can recite most of the nursery rhymes on the dvd's(including the dreaded xmas ones) and we could understand 30% of it and it is getting better as he is practising by watching them every day.
He knows he can request songs by singing them and enjoys it when we get it right, also gets frustrated when we don't. It is really cute apart from when he gets up and 3AM and starts requesting them.

Thanks Lingle I think I have managed to get my head round it. I have also read your other thread, lots of useful and positive info. It seems that the best course of action for now is to let him carry on for a while at the same time working on things like intensive interaction/ ABA. He has only just found his confidence in repeating words from Ipad/TV so i don't want to take that away from him too quickly. He currently has no functional language apart from the word "Up" and this is what concerns me the most.

Our SALT has identified him as a visual learner so has given us strategies to work on involving lots of visual aids, PECS, now and next cards, receptive labeling etc so will keep working on that as well.

BTW, did you manage to get your ds a deferred entry in school. We are trying to do the same as ds1 is a july baby but he was born very early.

Thelightpassenger thats interesting what you say about pretend play. we often catch ds1 manipulating his bob the builder when he is watching videos. For example, he was watching elmo blow his nose and he touched bob's nose at the same time copying elmo from the video.

Merlincat ds1 still cannot sing the nursery rhyme 'twinkle twinkle', but he listened to this and copied the note at 10seconds almost perfectly. We put on some classical music at bedtime to help calm him after bath and he requests that sometime by humming the tune.

As you said on your thread lingle, massive headf*ck is what it is...

DD1 (7.1, MLD) is very musical, or at least, she sings all the time. Her speech isn't clear, so she often muddles through lines she doesn't understand.

She sings:

"Good Mornin', Good Mornin', how are you? Just fine! harraaray dodada dayyyyyy. Making friends together, work is so much fun, ladeeladyearrerr, come on everyone!"

It's exactly the same bits that are mangled every time

DD2 (5.5 ?Something) is also quite musical and she makes up songs. She doesn't like it if you join in though.

DD3 (3.9 NT) sings a lot but she has pretty much perfect intonation and learns words incredibly accurately.

"ds1 used to stop, go rigid and shake when it was on. It had a very physical effect on him. Classical music seems to do that a lot to ds1 - and there's a fine line between him being able to tolerate it or it simply being too much."

I can remember music being intolerable because the sensations were too strong - being a girl with reasonable skills, I just withdrew into my shell, so lots of adults concluded that I didn't like music/wasn't musical.

lightpassenger -it is quite satisfying to find a term that includes both musicality and jigsaw making isn't it? I think extreme memory feats can be included too.

all well with you?

Hi Dev, I'm so glad you've concluded that now is not the time to resist the music. I'm still wondering how I thought DS2 had 200 words at 3.0 - I think I included each word of the lyrics of the songs he sang in my list :) - it's quite overwhelming to look back at the thread in a way - I can sense how brittle I was and yet how full my heart was.

It sounds as though at present you'll carry on using music for his pre-language skills of (i) synchronising with others and (ii)turn taking with others.

But also, you said "He knows he can request songs by singing them and enjoys it when we get it right, also gets frustrated when we don't."

So I wonder whether we should consider each of these short musical quotes to be one functional word: he initiates by saying the word (ie singing the requested song) and uses it to get something, just as if he said "biscuit" to get a biscuit or "up" to be lifted up Which would in turn identify an area where his motivation is high. With DS2, requesting a tune he liked was very similar to requesting a foodstuff he liked, as he was anticipating pleasure. But music requests had more potential from the parent's point of view because if the child will accept you singing as a substitute for the recording, then it can help him anticipate a pleasure that is shared. And then you can start to sing it wrong followed by a huge "oops!", etc, etc. you know the drill.

Delighted to hear he's a visual learner. We learnt this at about 3.4 and moved immediately to having everything visual - my house is still full of photos. Moondog recommended Linda Hodson's book "Visual Strategies" to me and I'm forever grateful. Our SALT (having correctly identified that he was a visual learner) was only resourced to hand me "one size fits all " visuals, but the Hodson book talks you through how and why they work (or don't work), so it's a "training the trainer" resource really - she aims to empower you to develop your own visual strategies bespoke for your child, and that's the kind of resource I like. Here's a link and it seems as though Linda's career has moved on too to consultancy etc - lindahodgdon.com/autismproducts - I hope she's experiencing lots of success, she deserves it.

Yes we year-deferred. Due to a colossal cock-up by the government, it's got harder to do so though. Your LEA will acknowledge your legal right to keep him in nursery till he's 5 but then say there's no point because he'll go straight into year 1. They will reassure you that reception is very play-based, to which I say bollocks - DS2 at 4 needed to be in an environment were "literacy" meant mark-making and could mean "learning to understand requests". In reception, the children are on a trajectory towards reading and writing sentences which would have just tied in with the extreme pattern recognition thing again..... Your health professionals may be a better route.

I think when I announced at 3.4 we were year-deferring my SALT and paed. humoured me but felt there was little point as DS2 would probably always be "different" and I simply wasn't "ready" to accept this. I'm asking myself now, "if they had been right, would it still have been better to exercise my legal right to keep DS2 in nursery for another year then deal with the fallout later?" and I think the answer is "yes". Nursery's the best place to work on the basic skills I think and the fifth year is one of the last ultra-flexible years in their brain development.... It turned out that they weren't right - his progress escalated rapidly from autumn 2008 onwards and he's on the quirky side of normal, which means that being a year "behind" has transformed his life-chances.