Lexie's Speech Evaluation Results

Today Lexie's case manager and speech therapist came to give us the results of her speech evaluation several weeks ago.  After scoring the hour long test, they have qualified Lexie for services again.  Lexie's receptive language skills (language that she understands) scored very well.  She's able to understand almost everything that is told to her and follow a series of instructions, etc.  However, her expressive language skills scored very poorly.  We had expected these results based on how she has been responding so well to what we tell her, yet her own expressive vocabulary is very small at about 20 words.  Because there is such a gap in her receptive and expressive language skills, that indicates a problem and qualifies her for speech therapy to try to close that gap.

The speech therapist will come to our house for an hour each week for at least this first month until the therapist can get a better idea of really what is wrong with Lexie's speech development.  After that, it's expected that the therapist will come twice a month to track Lexie's progress and continue to coach me on exercises to do with Lexie.  Her IFSP goal is to ask for what she wants at least 5 times a day (5 different items) using the appropriate word approximation.  It'll take a lot of hard work to reach that goal, but how wonderful that will be!

From what the speech therapist has observed so far, it is believed that Lexie has a motor language problem where she understands what is said, and can even formulate her own words in her head, but is not able to physically make the words with her mouth and lips.  More testing and observation will be done over the next month to see if that's really the problem.  We're grateful to have such easy access to programs that will help her and just hope that this therapy and focused attention on her speech will help increase her vocabulary and ease her frustrations.