Faster and Faster

That's how the language thing is going for MK. For a while after he had a very rapid advance in his rate of language acquisition, it seemed to slow down. In fact, it did slow down. But some other things started happening.

First, he began accepting questions about things that he said. It used to be that if MK said something and I asked him for extra details, or clarification or anything of that sort, the response would be a shouted, "I said, (insert whatever it what he just said, repeated verbatim)!" That's if I was lucky. A grunt of frustration and an end to the conversation was equally common, if not more so. But a month or so ago MK suddenly started answering these questions with the information requested. It's really quite disconcerting. I keep asking questions and waiting for the shout, and it doesn't come. I just find out what MK means and the conversation goes forward. Odd. There is almost no guess work required on my part. It almost take the sport out of it.

More recently, he has even started lacing his speech with extra information before it is asked for. He goes forward, pauses, fills in back-story or explains who the protagonists are, just at the point where the information becomes necessary. It's real-time theory of mind based discourse. It's kind of cool.

In the past few weeks the vocabulary has been shooting up again with daily double-digit gains. Also, there is this thing where, if you explain a new word once, he just remembers it. I've got to tell you, that is extremely convenient.

That's not to say that we are without linguistic hiccups. Yesterday, when I asked him if he know what the fives senses were, he answered, "Of course! A nickel." Irregular and intransitive verbs are still a bit irregular and intransigent. And just because MK is developing an ordinary style of discourse, that does not mean that topics of conversation have followed suit. We are still told repeatedly about the statistics for death an injury in amusement parks around the globe, for example. (Globally speaking, they are up in 2007 over 2006, in case you were wondering.) And sometimes, it just breaks down and the whole communication through speech thing doesn't work for a while. I know from my friends on the Autism Hub that this is no big deal. We just drop it and hang out. I'm always up for that.