Expert: James Michael Roan - 10/10/2006

Question
my son has been diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder nos with atypical autism. he is eight years old and so for does not talk. we have had in speech therapy since was two years old. he does make sounds but no words to really speak of come out. does he have a chance of speaking? we were told once that he may never speak. but we still hope that he will. should we expect that he will start talking eventually? or are we expecting ot much? the school is now teaching him sign language, but they keep acting like he will start talking any day now. we as his parents can see himm talking but not like the school expects him to. how far do we push him to talk?

Answer
Hi Tammy;

If your son has high functioning autism/PDD-NOS it is unlikely that his lack of speech production is a direct result of his autism. I would suspect apraxia or an oral-motor related problem. Apraxia is a motor related problem where there is varying difficulty with the planning and fluid execution of a series of motor actions as is necessary for speech production. This is a motor problem and is not a developmental one. It does not go away with maturation and requires therapy. If he has low oral-motor tone evidenced by drooling and sometimes choking on some foods, he may not have the strength to produce coherent speech sounds. He needs to be avaluated for this right away.

How is his receptive language? How well can he follow directions? Do you have testing results from a speech and language pathologist?

Kind regards,
Jim