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[quote=Anonymous]Good lord some of these posters are insuferable.

OP, I've been where you are and I do have a positive story:
DS is 7.  He started speech therapy at 18 months old and is still receiving services now, heading into second grade.  He doesn't have any receptive delays (and yes, I'm sure.  yes, he's been tested extensively.  yes, I know it can be hard to tease out.  yes, I'm sure it's not co-morbid with autism/dyslexia/ADHD/mutism/whatever else).

Every. single. step. has been a loooong, hard slog.  BUT - he keeps moving forward.
At 4, strangers couldn't understand him at all, and even those closest to him had to really focus.  His articulation was terrible, his word recall was bizarrely wrong, and his sentence structure was that of a toddler.  But we kept working and working and working, twice a week, for years.  
His latest eval had him at slightly below average!  I can't tell you how excited I was to hear that :-)  
He still has a long way to go - his word recall is still weird (he'll come up with long, complicated, convoluted ways to explain things because he can't think of the right word), his grammar is way below grade level, and he still can't say /r/ to save his life.  BUT - he is 100% intelligible even by strangers.  He can communicate all his ideas and needs and wants.  And every day/week/month he's getting better and better.
One of his main goals in 1st grade was appropriate use of he/she, him/her, and plurals.  It took most of the year, but he got it!  Now we're working on past tenses and irregular verb forms.  And he's getting there!  And we'll keep working and keep working and keep working.

The way I've come to think about it is that DS needs to have every little bit of language rules explicitly taught to him.  Things that most kids will automatically pick up through hearing others, he needs to be taught and practice through lots of repetition.  So it's taking a lot longer than for other kids.  But once he gets a skill, he has it.  So he'll screw up irregular verbs as a 7 year old - not the end of the world. And he'll probably never be a lover of words.

But I'm confident now that he'll be able to speak and communicate clearly and correctly as an adult.  When he was 4, I definitely wouldn't have been able to say that sentence.

Hang in there![/quote]

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