Brycen's "burst" of language

Words cannot express my excitement over what Brycen has been doing the last couple of weeks!! I had a conversation with the SLP in Spencer today during his therapy session and shared what we have been noticing and received some fabulous feedback from her.

Here are the UNPROMPTED words that Brycen has said over the last couple weeks:
Elmo, dada, hat, apple, shoes, juice, blow, go, cow and pop.
The first 6 words were heard at home and the last 4 I heard today during his session with her.

While it is absolutely exciting to hear these words coming out of his mouth (they do not have all the sounds so once again, they are called word approximations), it is over the top that these words have all been used in the appropriate context! That means that every single time he has used these unprompted words, he is using them appropriately!! For example, he was looking in a bag I had packed for Aubree of toys and he pulled out the Elmo stuffed animal and said "Ebo." It wasn't prompted and it was him doing the labeling correctly! Another example is when the SLP sits down on the floor with him with the bubbles and she waits for him to communicate what he wants. He then says blow "bo" to let her know he wants her to blow the bubbles. These are huge, HUGE, HUGE steps in this whole process of teaching him functional communication (I can't emphasize that enough!).

I have been thinking all afternoon about how to explain this to those who are not familiar with autism and any disorder that involves a speech and language delay. I think I have come up with a "story" that explains it best.

When you see or hear something, your body sends a message to your brain and then your brain interprets what you see or hear and then sends a message back to your mouth to respond. With Aubree, I can say a word and she watches my lips and hears what I say, that message is sent to her brain to interpret what she heard/saw, and then her brain sends a message back to her mouth/lips and she then repeats the word I say almost perfectly (her developmental level is right on with her chronological age of 2 yrs 3 months). With Brycen, he may hear or see me saying that word, but when the message is trying to be sent to his brain to be interpreted, his brain cannot "read" the message correctly and then either doesn't submit a message to his mouth or will send a mixed message to his mouth. This results in either no response from him or the sound he will make is completely different than the sound/word that I said. Example: we may ask him to say a word with the sound "m" but he will make the "p" sound.

I am no expert on speech, language, and communication disorders, but I find myself well educated in this area through my education, my research and experience with Brycen, as well as my many years of experience with many other adults and children affected in this area of their lives. To me, it seems like Brycen's brain is missing some of those connections that are in teh brains of neuro-typical children. While it also seems like those connections are trying really hard to interpret and send the correct messages, hence the newer sounds and few unprompted words, the connections aren't staying there which is very frustrating for everybody involved. It's like they disappear!

I hope this all makes sense to you and maybe you can give me some feedback on similar "stories" you know of how this works. The brain is obviously very complex and in all honesty, I HATED science classes in school, but it's different now. I don't really see it as science anymore, I see it as reality and how it is affecting Brycen. I am really curious about what his brain looks like on an MRI now compared to the brain of a neuro-typical child of the same age. Maybe when things settle down in our life, I will contact U of I for more testing in this area. It'll be so nice to live much closer to U of I soon so these things are more feasible to fit with our family lifestyle and work schedules!