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Date:         Thu, 23 Jul 1992 10:44:00 +1000
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         LNCJB@CC.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU
Subject:      Losing speech.

Michael,

You mentioned that David acquired 20 to 30 words before he lost speech. At what
age did this happen? Was the loss possibly precipitated by some traumatic
experience? I ask these questions because a similar thing occurred with Helen.

Helen said her first word at 3 months and continued to acquire language in what
appeared to be a normal fashion until she was 18 months of age. At 18 months
she was uttering phrases....."wanna cupacoppee"; "goinna car" etc. On the
2nd of December 1989, I left home leaving her with her brother to go to the
doctor's.....I was admitted to hospital and I didn't see her for three days.
When I finally managed to convince my family to bring Helen to see me in
hospital, it was obvious that she was angry with me and refused to talk or
have anything to do with me. For 3 months after that Helen did not say a word
to me or anyone else...she was totally mute. When she did start making noises
again it appeared that she was starting the language acquisition phase all over
again.....she started with babylike babbling; then echolalic speech (more
sophisticated than a baby's though) and then single words. There was no
resemblance at all during this stage to the utterances she had been making
prior to 18 months, even the pet words she had had for various items never
turned up in her speech. It was as if her memory for language had been totally
erased by the trauma of separation.....at least this is what I thought had
happened. That was until I attended a seminar given by Dr. Hurford from
Edinburgh University. In his talk he suggested that there were a number of
genes which facilitated language acquisition in children and these switched
on or off at various stages during the language acquisition phase allowing
a different combination of genes to be operating at any particular stage.
(I hope my memory is not doing him any injustice....it was quite a while ago.)
From this I speculated that if there was one 'faulty' gene that switched on
at 18 months in Helen this was also a possible explanation of the disruption
to her language acquisition.....delaying it until it switched off again and
the 'good' genes took over again. I think it is also reasonable to suggest that
this 'gene switching' was precipitated by stress.

After losing her speech it took Helen 4 years to reacquire it and I don't
think it is a coincidence that she is still considered to be 18 months delayed
in language production. Language comprehension though wasn't delayed and she
has always 'understood' what was said to her at the level of her peers,
although she did have some problems with distinguishing certain different
syntactic structures. She had difficulty with 'WH' questions - in particular
she confused "How are you?" with "How old are you?" and questions beginning
with 'what' and 'who'. She also had problems with personal pronouns.

I mentioned this 'loss of speech' to Dr. Fenelon last week. He said he had
not heard of this happening in this way before. Does any of this sound
familiar to anyone?

Carolyn
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