you you you you say it

Yesterday Xiana started stuttering. She has an immense vocabulary and speaks really well. She suddenly started saying, "you you you you you you you you try it..." or whatever. I was a little freaked because it was so out of the ordinary for her. Tonight I looked it up and was filled with great relief from webmd and parents.org. Here is what they had to say (and it makes sense to me):

• Normal nonfluency looks like stuttering, but is usually temporary. When children are developing their language skills they often try to organize their language and process information quickly resulting in repetition of sounds or words.
• There is a difference between developmentally normal stuttering and speech impediments. The former is quite common and is the result, essentially, of being able to think faster than one can produce words; in the mismatch, some language gets "stuck". This is likely to occur right after having a linguistic growth spurt when sentences are moving to a new level of complexity. (Xiana's sentences have certainly evolved to a new level of complexity lately. She suddenly understands and articulates concepts that shock me)
  
• Wait it out. Do not draw attention to it (which would foster self-consciousness) and do not finish his/her sentences or offer the next word.
• It may be a result of a rapid development in conceptual knowledge and a need to communicate that knowledge without the requisite vocabulary skills.
• Essentially, the child's cognitive development is slightly ahead of his/her speech development. In other words, they can't get the words out fast enough!

• Basically the idea is that they are focusing so hard on expressing a more complex thought than they have before, that in doing so, they regress on skills they already had, like articulating clearly or getting a whole sentence out smoothly.
• Some children (especially kids who are articulate and have big vocabularies) have brains that work ahead of their mouths. Their thoughts are so far ahead of them that they have to repeat words as their brain resupplies words already passed by. The problem stops when their mouths catch up with their brains.

So, all is well in the mind of Lenaya and I am, once again, reassured of the incredible intelligence of Xiana :) And we both remain ever so modest! good good good good good good night!