Just a quick background--DD is at least 3 1/2 years old (she was adopted from a Vietnamese orphanage at what we were told was 4 months old in June 2007...her pediatrician thinks that she was at least 6-7 months old at the time and possibly older). She was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder and Selective Mutism in the past year due to various issues. I'm not sure those issues are quite relevant to this post, but if someone thinks they are, I can post more about them. The one part that is relevant is that she didn't speak until she was almost 3, and as a baby, they thought she was deaf because she never responded to anything. She passed multiple hearing tests and it was brushed off as a symptom of her RAD & SM.
She's been in therapy with a psychologist who is an autism specialist, and we've known him for 4 years now, since he's DS's autism specialist. We've finally made some major headway with her RAD and selective mutism. Besides a few really really nasty rages a couple times a week, she's not showing many symptoms of RAD anymore. She's been talking to us at home for as long as she's been talking, and recently in the past month has been starting to say a couple of words out of the house to people besides her therapist (she's been talking to her therapist in short sentences for several months now).
Now that she's talking more, we're noticing some odd issues. For example, her colors. She can match colors really really well, but she can't name them. We've been working on them at home for a couple years and she just can't get it. Her therapist has been working on it for several sessions and she can't get it. Her session today left us dumfounded. They were playing with some colored counting bears--red, blue, yellow, green. He would take a bunch of one color and line them up, pick one up, and say "what color is this? Say 'red'." And she'd correctly repeat the color. He'd go down the line of red bears and repeat it for like 10 bears. Then he'd get to the last one and just say "what color is this?" and she'd say "blue". Obviously it's red, and she just said red 10 times. And if he asked her to hand him a red one, she'd hand him the blue, yellow, or green one. Repeat this for all of the other colors.
She also answers questions very oddly. Like the answers don't even make sense in the context of the question. One example of this from today is:
Me: "Jocelyn, can you hand me that game?"
Jocelyn: "Because I went home and went pee pee."
She'll also answer a lot of questions with "I don't know"...things from "what do you want for a snack?" to "why are you crying?" to "what are you playing with?"
The therapist said he's kind of at a loss because he can't find a pattern to it. It could be auditory processing, but typically people with CAPD can perform better in quiet situations than noisy ones, but she has the same poor performance in both settings. He would suspect cognitive delays, but she is doing just fine with all milestones that have nothing to do with expressive & receptive language. She's homeschooled and she does all of her montessori-based work with the manipulatives really well. She plays well and besides some social delays, she's meeting all milestones. She has a huge vocabulary and speaks in paragraphs and can have long appropriate conversations on her terms. He said he can't rule out some type of processing disorder or some type of cognitive delay, but she doesn't fit the mold for either of them. He admits that his speciality is autism though, and obviously not processing disorders.
Does anyone have any insight of what type of processing disorder, etc I should be looking into? My background is all in psychology/sociology/counseling, so anything outside of that is really out of my own range of knowledge too...
She's been in therapy with a psychologist who is an autism specialist, and we've known him for 4 years now, since he's DS's autism specialist. We've finally made some major headway with her RAD and selective mutism. Besides a few really really nasty rages a couple times a week, she's not showing many symptoms of RAD anymore. She's been talking to us at home for as long as she's been talking, and recently in the past month has been starting to say a couple of words out of the house to people besides her therapist (she's been talking to her therapist in short sentences for several months now).
Now that she's talking more, we're noticing some odd issues. For example, her colors. She can match colors really really well, but she can't name them. We've been working on them at home for a couple years and she just can't get it. Her therapist has been working on it for several sessions and she can't get it. Her session today left us dumfounded. They were playing with some colored counting bears--red, blue, yellow, green. He would take a bunch of one color and line them up, pick one up, and say "what color is this? Say 'red'." And she'd correctly repeat the color. He'd go down the line of red bears and repeat it for like 10 bears. Then he'd get to the last one and just say "what color is this?" and she'd say "blue". Obviously it's red, and she just said red 10 times. And if he asked her to hand him a red one, she'd hand him the blue, yellow, or green one. Repeat this for all of the other colors.
She also answers questions very oddly. Like the answers don't even make sense in the context of the question. One example of this from today is:
Me: "Jocelyn, can you hand me that game?"
Jocelyn: "Because I went home and went pee pee."
She'll also answer a lot of questions with "I don't know"...things from "what do you want for a snack?" to "why are you crying?" to "what are you playing with?"
The therapist said he's kind of at a loss because he can't find a pattern to it. It could be auditory processing, but typically people with CAPD can perform better in quiet situations than noisy ones, but she has the same poor performance in both settings. He would suspect cognitive delays, but she is doing just fine with all milestones that have nothing to do with expressive & receptive language. She's homeschooled and she does all of her montessori-based work with the manipulatives really well. She plays well and besides some social delays, she's meeting all milestones. She has a huge vocabulary and speaks in paragraphs and can have long appropriate conversations on her terms. He said he can't rule out some type of processing disorder or some type of cognitive delay, but she doesn't fit the mold for either of them. He admits that his speciality is autism though, and obviously not processing disorders.
Does anyone have any insight of what type of processing disorder, etc I should be looking into? My background is all in psychology/sociology/counseling, so anything outside of that is really out of my own range of knowledge too...
