Receptive language delay

[Loppyloo5]

Hi all I am seeking some advise/support.

My DS is 2.8 and has and speech and language delay. We are not sure of the cause yet (he has had hearing loss from birth due to glue ear but has grommets in the last 8 weeks but this could be a red herring) we are seeing a development pead and being reviewed every 6 months.

My main concern is his receptive language as I know you must understand first in order to talk. He follows instructions in nursery rhymes (I add new ones in or mix them around to make sure his not doing it from memory) but he doesn’t understand things like where is mummy or get me the ball. Any ideas on how I can help him whilst we wait for a speech therapist. At the moment I am commenting on all the stuff he is doing using one word labels.

Has anyone had experience with speech and language delay can offer me some encouragement as not knowing what the future holds for my son is really upsetting.

We had it from the age of 3 to the age of about 9. At one point 4 times per week spent ££££ plus had nhs SLT.

once assessed by gosh hospital to exclude other factors we were referred to their apd clinic. The wait would have been about 2/3 years (small department) so we went private one of the gosh dr gave us the name.

once we had the full assessment we understood why he wasn’t learning and getting better. We then targeted that and he improved so so much, speaks beautifully now.

it is very individual hence requiring the assessment of a fully qualified dr (SLT is not a doctor but rather a therapist - like if you break a leg you go to the doctor for diagnoses then the physio does the therapy) took me years to figure it all out but here we are…

Was Dc diagnosed with a central auditory processing disorder?

@viio Sounds like you had quite a journey! What kind of doctor did the assessment? I liked your analogy doctor vs therapist :) And what specific therapy did you do?

We had a dr double qualified audiology and SLT which is necessary so that they can pick out all the missing strands that one dr with narrow specialism may miss.

we then had therapy with another dr who we were referred to (she too had specialism in audiology’s and SLT) and she did therapy with my child. One year therapy then sent us back to the dr that diagnosed it for reassessment. The results speak for themselves…. We still have a bit of work but are taking a break…

@viio what was particular about the therapy they did? any idea how it was different from what a regular SLT would do?

My child had headphones in one ear they listened the noisy environment in another ear they were given instructions to follow their brain had to work hard to decipher what was going on but with enough training my
child got better this improved the focus and therefore school and learning etc there is a lot of staff but can’t write it all here … this is just an example of how improving brain function and retraining it can help… if one know how and what to do. SLT doesn’t do any of that and isn’t qualified…

Here is a link to the differences between a central auditory processing disorder and a receptive language disorder:

https://allisonaudiology.com/patient-resources/auditory-processing-disorder/differences-between-language-processing-disorder-and-auditory-processing-disorder/

It seems CAPD is just about processing sounds, but the language skills are intact, whereas with a receptive language disorder of the auditory processing type, as DD1 has, there is the severe phonological processing disorder; and the language skills are disordered. For instance, even if DD1 could process the sounds perfectly, her ability to sequence sounds within a word, words within a sentence and sentences within a paragraph would still be very poor. When she was first talking up to about age 5, there was no word order in a sentence. We had have seen ourselves what she was talking about, otherwise we couldn’t make sense of her sentences. As I said, her concept formation was impaired, so she can only understand concrete language, apart from a few high frequency abstract words taught specifically - she would have never been able to cope with the abstract language in a mainstream secondary.