If it’s not for communication, what’s the point? As I didn’t know much at the time, I made a mistake thinking that as soon as my son started speaking, everything would be fine. However, though Alyosha did start talking at the age of seven, ‘talking’ is not the word to describe his verbal utterances. My boy echoed words and phrases that he had heard in the past, often irrelevant to the situation, or just ‘talked’ to himself. There seemed to be words which he especially liked,