Aphasia

[JCat]

I'm starting to look up information about Aphasia and will gladly accept any suggestions as to resources or good books about this! I thought this aspect of my son's speech was lumped in with the Apraxia but apparently it's a whole other thing. It also looks like a lot of autistic kids have this issue going on but, as always, when you bring up a lot of things about an autistic child you are met with , "That's normal for someone autistic." TIA if anyone knows anything.

[niccig]

I'm starting to look up information about Aphasia and will gladly accept any suggestions as to resources or good books about this! I thought this aspect of my son's speech was lumped in with the Apraxia but apparently it's a whole other thing. It also looks like a lot of autistic kids have this issue going on but, as always, when you bring up a lot of things about an autistic child you are met with , "That's normal for someone autistic." TIA if anyone knows anything.

Apraxia is a motor planning speech disorder - difficulty with planning motions needed for speech. Aphasia is a language disorder - it's loss of ability to understand or expressively say speech (but it's not he motor planning part of the brain that's affected) - typically patients have Aphasia due to stroke or head injury. Apraxia can also be from a stroke (Acquired apraxia), but there's also childhood apraxia of speech that can be from stroke or from birth, but this is where it gets confusing as we just don't know enough to know why some children have apraxia from birth. Both are communication disorders, but it's different parts of the brain that are affected - and with aphasia there's different types of aphasia that affect different parts of the brain.

Here's definition of aphasia http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/Aphasia/
Definition of childhood apraxia of speech http://www.asha.org/public/speech/di...ldhoodApraxia/ (adult acquired is separate disorder)
Here's a comparison of the two http://www.strokeassociation.org/STR...p#.Vqm9BcYrKJc

I would be interested in seeing any research that says people who have autism have aphasia as typically "aphasia" is reserved for the language disorder acquired from brain injury from a stroke etc - person (child or adult) did have typical language function, but now has lost expressive, receptive or both language function due to brain injury. I could see saying that difficulties with language in people who have autism could appear similar to what see in a person who has aphasia, but my understanding is that it's because of different etiology, so we use different terms to describe it. But please let me know what you have read.

HTH

[JCat]

There is pretty much nothing out there that I have found so far. Now that he is able to speak much better it's obvious that there are lots of times when he knows something but cannot access all his language to express himself and instead says the closest thing that he can to what he would like to say, but he knows it's not what he wants to say. I see this in some of his autistic friends as well. (As well as all the other symptoms described with the language and writing skills.) I've also read the effect described in books written by autistic adults though they describe it in relation to gross and fine motor skills. It seems like the same effect so I figured I'd read up on it and see if there is anything that can help. But there's pretty much nothing. I may resort to looking for autobiographies written by adults who have dealt with aphasia.

[Kindra178]

Look up language processing disorder or language disorder as well.

[niccig]

There is pretty much nothing out there that I have found so far. Now that he is able to speak much better it's obvious that there are lots of times when he knows something but cannot access all his language to express himself and instead says the closest thing that he can to what he would like to say, but he knows it's not what he wants to say. I see this in some of his autistic friends as well. (As well as all the other symptoms described with the language and writing skills.) I've also read the effect described in books written by autistic adults though they describe it in relation to gross and fine motor skills. It seems like the same effect so I figured I'd read up on it and see if there is anything that can help. But there's pretty much nothing. I may resort to looking for autobiographies written by adults who have dealt with aphasia.

Are you talking about paraphasias - see here for a brief explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphasia

Is he using the wrong word than the one he wants, but it's related? It might also be word finding difficulties - he's not fully able to access his lexicon, but pulls something related e.g. wants word "car" but pulls "truck" instead.

[JCat]

Yes the Verbal Paraphasia looks like it covers almost everything thank you!!!
When we started he was unable to say the word "no". Which was super fun at preschool. They thought because he was talking he could give an accurate answer. I used to have to ask him a question, then ask him, "yes, no, maybe, something else" because he couldn't even say that much so often he would give a rote response because it was easier, or say the closest rote response to what he meant, or just answer 'yes'. If I gave him the prompts at least we could get closer and closer to what he wanted to say so we were always circling around the answer until we got it, then I'd have him repeat what I said. He's much better now but definitely still not able recall many words he needs when he wants to so even though he has this amazing vocabulary, he can rarely use it. The speech evaluations for this had the therapist saying the word, then him pointing to the correct picture so it avoided this problem and he did well.