Autism-World

I’m just wondering if anyone has any ideas for teaching vocal imitation.  This is the only area that my son has made no progress in – the rest of his goals in his VB program he is amazing everyone with daily gains, and we have even been able to add more programs this week, in which he is already showing success.  Honestly, I don’t know if verbal speech is possible for him, but would like to give it a good try.  He can make “bababa” and “ah ah” sounds when he wants to, generally when he is playing and/or is excited, but never on cue, and overall he is a pretty quiet kid.  I don’t recall him ever making any other sounds than these, other than a high pitched shrieking “ah” sound when he is really excited or really mad.  Again, it’s never on cue and it’s never directed at anyone that I can tell, so he doesn’t seem to connect it to communication.  We have tried using really strong reinforcers and modeling the sounds, using a little microphone, he just doesn’t seem to be catching on.  This is a very high stress area for him – the whole mouth/neck area that is – as he has a pretty extreme oral aversion (100% tube fed because of this) and has a significant health history relating to this area with his tracheotomy (removed almost two years ago now), several surgeries, severe reflux, and just a lot of negative experiences, but I’m not sure that this is the issue at this point, at least concerning his learning to vocalize.  He does have a cyst on one vocal cord but his ENT surgeon didn’t feel that it would have an impact on his ability to speak.  When we use the microphone (”do this” command and make the sound ourselves first) and hold the it out for him to make a noise into it he just puts his lips on it like he does when we want him to “take a bite” from a spoon, so I really don’t think he understands what we want him to do.  He is pretty limited with his receptive language, and obviously non-verbal with no expressive language.  He is able to imitate both gross motor and actions with objects, so he does seem to understand the “do this” command in other instances anyway.  We are teaching sign language also, which he is having slow but steady success with. I’m just wondering if there might be something else we could try for vocal imitation.  Any ideas?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under Parent Resources.