I thought it would be helpful to start off this entry with a little personal background information.  As I’ve mentioned before, my disabilities are pretty certainly a result of brain injury at birth, accompanied by the development of hydrocephalus.  I was in what they refer to as the “first generation” of shunt recipients for the condition (a shunt is a tube inserted through the brain into the ventricles with the other end draining into the chest or abdomen).

Many of us share similar cognitive strengths and weaknesses.  Short version is language areas good, spatial areas not so good.  Nevertheless, once you’ve been identified with a pathology, there’s a tendency for some professionals to view some behaviors that might be seen as precocious in most children as dysfunctional in children already identified as ‘damaged.’

For example, when a precocious child uses vocabulary advanced for their age, he or she might not have full comprehension of the full meaning of the word he or she is using.  When we see a precocious kid, we cut him or her slack for learning such words at all, and don’t wonder that their life experiences haven’t caught up so that full comprehension of their meaning is there.

Well, a lot of us kids with hydrocephalus turned out to be early talkers, and pretty good at amassing a large vocabulary unusual for our age.  Professionals came up with a term to describe what they saw – ‘Cocktail Party Speech’ which is succinctly defined in this course material for a Speech/Language class:

Many hydrocephalic children have been characterized as hyperverbal with “cocktail party speech.” Cocktail party speech is an example of well developed form (well-developed articulation, intonation, and stress patterns) that is used for social interactions but has weak conceptual meaning.

It’s that second sentence that I think is relevant to the term I want to discuss.  The phenomenon here