[hadams]

Our daughter, home 2yrs, adopted at 24mo from Russia, was a little behind in verbally in her native language. Her orphanage director noted it during our interview, but said that it wasn’t a profound delay and would probably be cleared up by being in a family situation.

Based on our son’s (also adopted from Russia, but at a younger age, and about 2yrs earlier) experience, we gave her 6 months to acclimate to our family and to the new language before worrying. During that time, we worked one on one working on speech and attachment. Finger games, songs with actions, rhymes, reading, etc. At 30 mo, she was still behind verbally. However, the cutoff for providers of EI is 3yo, so instead of getting her tested and starting with one group, we waited until age 3 to start her at school.

She goes to preschool four mornings a week. She gets one on one speech therapy for two hours per week, and group activities to promote speech throughout. She is now almost 4. Her expressive speech has greatly improved. She has good pronunciation, and is using pronouns and subject/verb agreement correctly. She can accurately label almost anything in the house or in a book. She can identify numbers and letters, and count objects.

However, as her expressive skills got better, we were better able to see how profoundly she is delayed in her comprehension. One or two years ago, I would have told you that her comprehension skills were far better than her expressive skills.

What I mistook for true comprehension was intelligence, coping, and a desire to please. Example: I can ask her to go to her room, get her baby doll, and bring it back to me. She will do exactly that. I can tell her to fly to New York, rub her baby doll, and feed small bits to me. She will go to her room and get her doll and bring it to me.

She hears yada yada yada yada Baby Doll yada yada yada me. From that, she thinks…Mom said baby doll. Baby doll in room. I’ll go get it and show it to her!

Abstract comprehension is completely beyond her. Her brother was 6 months younger than she is now when we traveled to Russia to adopt her. He had no problem understanding the concept of us flying all the way across the ocean, going to a bunch of offices and courts, meeting a little girl, and bringing her back home on a plane to be his sister. All of those things created images in his mind he could comprehend.

My daughter doesn’t get an image for anything she can’t attach a label to. She is constantly getting misqueued because she hears or sees something that she focuses on, and misses the rest of the context.

I took her skiing for the first time last weekend. I talked to her about the drive to the hill, the hill, the snow, the skiis, the instructor. I talked about Ben learning to ski. I talked about going fast down hill, and making pizza wedges to slow down. She repeated everything back. I go to hill! I go in snow! I won’t go too fast.

She has never seen skiing before, but she has watched her brother skate before. All the way to the ski hill, she was convinced she was going skating. They put the skis on her, and she looked at them and said “funny skates.” All the time I had put into describing the hill, snow, skis, was completely lost. She repeated it because that was what I expected it of her, but she never really got that concept.

Her teachers don’t see the same thing. I don’t know if that is selective on her part, or if there are enough queues in a preschool setting for her to appear to be high-functioning. Between other students, labels, and routine, I don’t think there is a lot of time for abstract thought.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? A part of me says it is an ESL thing. I say that because when I first learned another language, I found that my ability to speak it progressed much faster than my ability to understand it. Because I could pick my own words and my own speed, I could communicate better than understand. Maybe that is my daughter’s problem?

I thought I could come here and see if anyone else has seen anything similar, and what if anything helped to work through it.