speech sample

When we were at the John Tracy Clinic this summer, we had the opportunity to look at Lucas's language skills with more depth. I had stopped keeping track of all of his words, because there were too many to count. But, with the help of one of their vocabulary books, we counted how many receptive and expressive words Lucas has. We came up with close to 500 expressive words, and 900 receptive words.

At a chronological age of 2 years 8 months, and a hearing age of 1 year 8 months, here is a speech sample of Lucas. I just love the Bill Martin / Eric Carle bear books (brown bear, polar bear, panda bear), but I especially love Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, for its simple animals and colors. When I read this to him, I pause to let him fill in the blanks, then I let him read the entire last page. I think it's great that the books are always summarized on the last page.  He just belts it out, so I decided I needed to get it on video.

I just love his sweet little voice, and his intonation and enthusiasm for what he's saying. It's not exactly a random language sample, because he's just making a running list of images he sees. But, I think it gives a good glimpse at how well he speaks. I think it's so cute that he adds "y" to most of the animals (ducky, froggy, etc.). I'm not quite sure why he says "black fish" instead of "black sheep", but "sheep" is actually the first word he says on the video. There are still a few articulation substitutions that he makes (doddy, instead of doggy), but he's not even 3 yet, so we're just going to wait for some of the later sounds to emerge. You can also see him sporting his new blue and white hearing aid mold (just in time for Penn State football season). It fits so beautifully and doesn't give feedback at all now. We will continue to encourage him to wear it, to stimulate that auditory nerve and see what it can do for him!

We are incredibly, incredibly proud of him and how far he's come. We never dreamed in a thousand years that he would talk this well, this soon, or even ever. To say that we are eternally grateful for this life-changing technology is a huge understatement. I still marvel every single day.