My son could already make some verbal requests when he was two years old. He invented words, and by trial and error we learned what each word meant. Balloon, for example, is "daw-daw." When my son wanted to watch the videos of the animated TV series "Noddy," he would tell me "Apukutch." For the films featuring a dog named Beethoven, he would say "Bow-bow." "Garfield" is "Afee." This system worked for some time until autism began to erase his limited language. It came to a point where he would cry aloud each time he wanted to watch a video as I was making a futile attempt to guess what he desired. Eventually, we just had to let him pick the disc of his choice and assist him in operating the player to
