Processing Issue?

We had written up a list of words Dominic uses expressively and receptively for Alpine to start probing and building upon last week. They started that yesterday. When I picked him up, they were very excited because he’d done a lot of talking. Including saying “I want Fuh Fish”. This was big because the fish were in the other room. They discussing if someone was teaching him to pronounce with the first sound of a word and that’s why the stutter, or if this is a brain processing thing. I think it’s the processing, and that’s what they agreed with. There’re also a lot of words he repeats the whole word, not just the first sound.

If this is the case, it is HUGELY exciting because it means that his processing ability is starting to come back. It goes along with our theory, too, that the virus disrupted synapses at a very basic level. So as Alpine is re - teaching him one tiny baby step at a time, those synapses are refiring and rewiring, and so its coming back.

I really think that the viral damage was done at a very basic level, because Dominic was / is missing the first steps that are building blocks to everything else: the eye contact, the first sounds of words, the jump to saying more than one syllable – even repeated. And once they can fill in those early stepping stones, I think he’s going to be able to put the more advanced pieces right back in. The other piece is if you make him mad enough he’ll try harder to say things.