Question:
My son has been diagnosed as having,

Severe Expressive/Receptive Speech & Language Disorder

He is a very intelligent little boy but has difficullty understanding andexpressing basic language which frustrates him greatly. He can become verydisruptive at times and requires constant attention.

Has anyone else ever heard of this disorder and if so is there a supportgroup/website that would be of help to me.

Answer: Is that another name for APHASIA? I know children with that and SematicPragmatic Disorder.

Aphasia is an even more general term. Kolb and Wishaw define it thus intheir basic textbook, _Fundamentals of Neuropsychology_:

'Aphasia refers to a disorder in speech, writing (agraphia), or reading(alexia) produced by injury in brain areas specialized for these functions.'

Most of the knowledge in this area comes from the study of people whohave acquired it in later life and the area of brain damage can beprecisely localised. The developmental kind is hardly understood at all.

I've spent hours trying to disentangle aphasia, receptive/expressive speechdifficulties, semantic pragmatic disorder, dyspraxia, Asperger Syndrome,high functioning autism, autistic spectrum disorders... by reading up herethere and everywhere, for writing a report for a course. The conclusion Icame to was similar to the ones discussed elsewhere under PDD - NOS etc(sorry about all those capital letters) - ie they all seem to overlap,different people describe them differently (eg Asperger Syndrome in somedefinitions excludes language delay, other definitions don't exclude it!)and the diagnosis you get has more to do with who is giving the diagnosisthan what the "symptoms" are. The pragmatic approach seems to be to pickthe one that gets the most support in your local area! I'm not cynical amI? As someone somewhere else said, it's like a rainbow, with the coloursmingling at the edges. IFrom a practical point of view, there's a lot to besaid for using the term Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and then describing thespecific characteristics of that person. But maybe that would be toosimple!