Likewise, esp. as the OP said it was the majority of the child’s speech. Maybe/probably something he’ll grow out of, but I think you’d be wise to have it checked out.
Not to disagree, but merely to share a piece of homespun wisdom my father taught me: never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Brief follow up: I mentioned this to his teacher via email and here was her response:
So we’ll see what the speech therapist has to say.
Good on ya, Frylock. I’d follow up if you don’t hear back in a couple of weeks. (Sometimes school therapists can be overworked and let things slip through the cracks.)
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Not super common of a description at this age.
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No one could even make a stab at this without knowing more information. Did he always do this or is it of recent onset? Is he bothered by it? Does he build up pressure during his pauses? Any facial expression changes? Is it when he is excited or not at any particular times? How is he otherwise, in his learning, in his interests, in his social relationships? What is his sense of humor like? How was his early language development and other milestones? Any significant new changes in his life? Anything else going on at all? Tics (which could just be eyeblinking repetitively) or anything? Any history in the family of tics or OCD or stuttering or anything else of note?
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A speech eval seems reasonable and the circumstance is NOT like asking a barber about a haircut. School speech therapists are already overloaded and would like nothing more than to avoid having anything more on their caseload. If it is a form of stuttering then getting intervention going sooner than later is important.
Understandable!
I can remember us being amused by it early in his fours.
Only if we interrupt…
Not at all. In fact he seems perfectly oblivious that anything’s wrong (unless we interrupt). It’s like, he’s just talking. He’s just taking a really long time to figure out how to say what he’s saying.
None that I’ve noticed.
My wife says I’m exaggerating when I say this characterizes most of his speech. She says it only happens when he’s trying to communicate something past a certain level of complexity. This seems believable to me but I can’t testify to it without more observation.
He seems super-smart to me (but I’m his dad so…) and he’s far more social than either me or his mom were at that age. He just walks up to groups of kids–older kids even–and sort of automatically organizes a game. And the other kids all follow suit like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I wish I had this talent.
He laughs uproariously at Tom and Jerry, and also giggles a lot at more “intellectual” (for a five year old) jokes like
“Jacob, say ‘no’”
“No”
“Aw, why not?”
“Hahahahaha”
I don’t remember the numbers but his mom took careful note of this (just because for her that kind of thing is fun, not out of any concern) and he was always ahead of where all the websites and doctor’s office white sheets said he should be, knowing more words, putting together more complex phrases, etc.
Nothing I can think of.
I think it’s been theorized that my grandmother was OCD but I don’t think that was ever diagnosed.
Jake does like to have things just so. But I never think of it as being anything more than a personality quirk. It never seems to get in the way of robust functioning, in other words.
My son, 4.5 years, does this occasionally and it seems to be when he really really wants to tell me something but feels like I’m not listening or feels like he has to rush to say it.
Lately if I hear him struggling I immediately stop what I’m doing, look him in the eyes, remain totally silent and give him my full attention. Once he feels less pressure he seems to loosen up, get his thoughts together, and say what he wants to say.
It doesn’t sound all that odd to me (IANA child speech development expert, or anything related). At that young age lots of kids have trouble communicating complex thoughts. He may even be beginning to percieve the structure of language and trying to sort out the grammar. I’m sure you’ll be able to tell if it’s a persistent problem instead of a phase.
Is this related to the complexity of the statement? Does he exhibit this behavior when talking to his peers?
And I see this even now in adults who have to start over on a complex statement to state it correctly.
Those are reassuring answers Frylock.
Generally kids with stuttering are bothered by it. By this age they are experiencing frustration that it is occurring and often building up some pressure behind the words they seem stuck on, sometimes even to the point of grimacing.
Developmental Dysfluency (sometimes spelled “disfluency”) OTOH is normal, albeit much more common at 3 than after 5. I think of developmental dysfluency as the brain getting ahead of the oral apparatus’s ability to keep up; the brain is devoting itself to the ideas being thought about two or three sentences ahead and meanwhile the tongue trips over itself. (The same thing happens with running btw, some kids start falling a lot after they’ve been walking well because they have stopped paying atention to their feet and are thinking more about what they will do after they’ve gotten across the room, pulled the chair over, and gotten on the countertop …)
Usually this happens when kids are excited but while less common at over 5, it can occur and his being over all very bright and happening mostly when he is dealing with more complex thoughts is very consistent with this. His mind may just be more concerned in organizing the upcoming complex ideas “just so” and too busy to attend to what he has already finished thinking about but is still on it way out of his mouth. These kids seem totally oblivious to the repeated sounds, words and phrases.
There is nothing else that you have mentioned that would increase suspicion of other causes - he has nothing else that would make one think about this being an odd verbal tic disorder or a presentation of OCD. (Which were things that went through my mind when I heard that it was nearly all the time. And the pause in the middle of the word and then keeping going with the word is still atypical for the usual developmental dysfluency.) His social skills, normal language development, normal (to above average) humor skills*, all enable an autistic spectrum variant to be safely crossed off the list.
It does not seem to be a manifestation of stress or anxiety.
Mind you I’d still have the school speech pathologist do a quick assessment. There are those few features that are not classic for developmental dysfluency, and he is on the older side for it. But the answers you gave make me much less concerned than I was on first impression.
*My anecdotally based belief is that humor milestones are more important than any other developmental stream: show me a kid who does not get the jokes they should for their age and I do not care if they know their letters, expect a need for services later on; show me kid who is ahead of the jokes for their age (real word play before 5 for example) and I don’t care if they can’t recognize all their letter, expect the kid to be labelled as gifted at some future point. Some day I’ll do a study to prove it …
My first reaction to your transcription was “Hey! Have you been sneaking into my house and taping the Smaller Girl?” But on reflection, there are a couple of differences in the way she does it. For starters, she mostly talks like this when she’s tired. Also, she doesn’t repeat exactly the same words, but tries out different starts and middles till she has the one she’s after. So it would be more like “But last night I…when I said…I wanted to not…last night when I…I didn’t want…” and so on for the next five minutes.
Is your son, by any chance, an extrovert? Extroverts do tend to talk out their thoughts before they’re fully formed. The Taller Girl (who’s an introvert) would at that age have been much more likely to go
“But last night… when I… [pause for three minutes]… when I said I want to sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed at bedtime I didn’t mean lights out as soon as I go to bed.”
Anyway, I’d be with the majority in thinking it’s something you might want to get checked out, but it doesn’t seem totally out of line with other speech development I’ve experienced.
Just another anecdote. My son sounded very much like what you transcribed at a similar age. He’s 15 now and has completely grown out of it. His speech has finally caught up with his brain, and this is not always a good thing.
That would not surprise me AT ALL. Really. I hadn’t thought it through as thoroughly as you, but this rings true to me. Let us know when you publish the study.
Does this happen when he reads?
He’s learning to read, but I wouldn’t say I could honestly claim he reads yet.
He can read some words and he can laboriously piece together very simple sentences, but not in a way that seems to reflect the same thing I described in the OP.
DSeid thanks for your very helpful advice and information. (Also concerning the ants thread btw.)
I’m going to try to get a more careful idea about the frequency of these “episodes” (for lack of a better term) and wait and see what his school speech therapist has to say. (I’ll follow up with her in a couple of weeks if I don’t hear back from her.)
It’s been my experience that many children exhibit that form of speech until they learn to get their thoughts organized. I see nothing wrong with seeing a therapist, as long as it doesn’t make him self-conscious. I’m no expert but suspect that it will diminish as his reading improves and can see how sentences are constructed. Hey, at least he’s talking… My parents were concerned with me as I didn’t talk until I was three, at which point I began spouting complete sentences. (I guess I didn’t want to look like an idiot :))
Radiolab, which is an NPR podcast about science, did a recent show about thinking, words, and speech in which one researcher put forward the idea that THINKING is actually taught by communication or speaking and that kids slowly internalize it. There may be some of this transition from external to internal thinking going on with your son. If nothing else, it is a fascinating show and a very interesting theory.
My pleasure and please let us know what she says.
It sounds like a form of stammering, and in little boys, and especially little boys that age, stammering is very common. You didn’t mention (that I can recall) how long he’s been doing this. If it just started or started recently, let it run its course, and it usually does.
We made a major move when my son was three and it got him so overstimulated–the moving experience itself, and being in a new home–that he started stammering. I was pretty sure that’s what is was–a temporary responce to an overstilumating event–so I first checked with his doctor. He confirmed my thought about the cause of it and told me to just let it runs its course. Which it did; in a few months the stammering faded away.
One of the most important things you can do is to NOT pressure him in any way. Be patient and let him get it out–not always easy, I know. But if he were to be pressured, it would make the stammering even worse. So, just bear with him and be patient.
I would suggest, though, that if it’s still going on in a few months, he needs to be seen by his doctor. You DON’T want him to get teased or made fun of by schoolmates. Children can be very cruel.