longer. Like the Sally-Anne test, the experiment sounds simple. But its implications are equally profound.
Imagine, says Courchesne,
a child focusing on a toy airplane he holds in his hands. Mother comes into the room and the sound of her footsteps captures his attention. He turns and listens closely as she suggests reading a favorite storybook while pointing to the shelf where it is kept. At the mention of the storybook, he shifts his attention from his mother’s words and gesture to his bookshelf, where he scans his array of books, looking for his favorite. When he spots it, he points to it, and he yells, «There it is!» and shifts his attention back to his mother, awaiting her response.
How ordinary. The average child can do something like this at eighteen months. How ordinary — and how complicated.
Four things have happened in the attentional and sensory world of this child. First, the child is stimulated by sensory information that he must process. Second, despite focusing his attention elsewhere, salient changes in auditory stimulation, mother’s footsteps, were detected, alerting the child to potentially important information outside his immediate focus and capturing his attention. Third, after redirecting his attention to mother’s words and actions, he maintains attention, listening closely and watching carefully for specific, important information. Fourth, when he sees and hears that specific information, the name of his favorite storybook and the gesture pointing to the shelf, he acts on that information by shifting his attention to the visual stimuli across the room. Again he focuses his attention, this time on a colorful array of books of various sizes, looking closely at each one for the specific book he now has in mind. When he detects it, he shifts his attention back to his mother. [15]
And if he can’t do all this, rapidly, easily, naturally?
You have an autistic child. You have Jessy.
Who at eighteen months was snaking a chain up and down, up and down, for twenty minutes, half an hour, longer…. Who at forty, focused on the Weather Channel, hears nothing I say. Who sees me get up to answer the phone yet informs me it’s ringing. Whose biggest problem at work is her unwillingness to interrupt one task and switch to another. She isn’t ignoring me. She isn’t inattentive. She isn’t contrary. She’s doing the best she can with the cerebellum she was born with.
No wonder she responds late, or not at all. No wonder she perseverates; it’s hard, for her to disengage her attention. No wonder she leaves out verbs and articles and pronouns and prepositions, in what those who know autism call «telegraphic speech». No wonder she likes proverbs and cliches, language that is repetitive, predictable, formulaic. No wonder she likes experience that is formulaic. When she watches TV, what is she watching for? Not the content, whatever that may be; not even the pictures. What she’s listening for, what she hears, is what we’ve named «intransition phrases»: «Coming up next», «Don’t touch that dial».
In the midst of family picture-taking, Jessy «snaps», so suddenly that father, mother, sister, brother, and brother-in-law are still smiling. Jessy likes this picture.
Happy and at ease in the T-shirt her brother gave her, Jessy displays the phases of the moon.
«Hold everything», «Stay tuned», «Be right back». She is delighted to write them down for me. She has identified twenty-six.
Jessy is doing the best she can, and she’s doing pretty well. People who knew her twenty years ago are amazed at how her speech has improved. That didn’t just happen — it has been the result of hard work, hers and ours. It has become second nature to speak to her directly, in words within her comprehension. It has become second nature to ask, not tell, so she must try to answer in her own words. It has become second nature to ask only what we judge she can answer. If we judge wrong and she seems at a loss, it has become second nature to fall back to an easier question, prompting her toward the goal she can’t reach unaided. It has become second nature to teach what normally needs no teaching.
Of course I would rather not teach Jessy language. To impose forms of language is to impose forms of thought. Better she should «pick up» words, ideas, spontaneously, naturally. But Jessy could not absorb language out of the air. I watch four-year-old Miranda playing with the telephone, dialing it, talking into it, the rise and fall of her voice mimicking her mother’s. Her play is practice. She will not have to be taught, as Jessy was, to identify herself by name or rehearsed through the shifting pronouns of «He’s not here, may I take a message». But that was years ago. Though autistic children become autistic adults, they do get better at listening and attending. Jessy now is picking up, yes, picking up for herself, phrases she can apply in much more complex situations. That is one of the slow, infinitesimal miracles that carry us forward.
Last month I went to the Stop and Shop without my discount card. I knew my lapse would become a subject of conversation; Jessy is intolerant of other people’s forgetting as well as her own, and she is particularly interested in supermarket cards. She scrutinized the sales slip; she determined that the card would have saved two dollars and forty-five cents. She talked about it, talked about it, talked some more.. And then, to my surprise, she disposed of it with a relaxed «Oh well, it’s only money». I never taught her that! But it’s there and will be there again (and again) — when the time comes.
Chapter 4
«Guess what!»
That was another long, slow chapter. This one will be shorter, since it deals not so much with what Jessy says, or the words in which she says it, but with something harder to convey: how she sounds. We encounter people through their voices. Sound shades into meaning: all sorts of messages reach us through these tones that can express everything from desolation to ecstasy. They too are aspects of Jessy’s language, deeply, intimately part of who she is.
You don’t have to hear Jessy say more than a few words to know that you’re not talking to a normal person. Quite apart from her stereotypic phrases or her telegraphic speech or the strangeness of what she may say, she sounds different. The difference is familiar to everyone who works with autistic children. Lorna Wing speaks of their «monotonous or peculiar vocal intonation»; developmental psychologist Bryna Siegel notes their «atypical tone of voice», «flat, atonal», «unmodulated», «consistently ‘off’ in some way»; an atypical prosody, to use the technical term[16], I prosody that like Jessy’s may continue into adulthood.
Face to face, over the phone, at a distance, Jessy’s voice is instantly recognizable. Though her repertoire of tones is characteristically limited, it is very much her own. «Guess what! 70003 is a prime!» Already exclamation points pepper these pages, typography’s pale attempt to capture the confident, positive voice in which Jessy, who was once thought to suffer from «early ego failure», announces her discovery. «Guess what! Every galaxy has lots of sun families! Know why I say that? Pretend the sun is the parent and the planets are the children and the earth is me!»
Those examples are from years ago, relics of outworn enthusiasms, but «Guess what!» is still Jessy’s trademark. More often these days it registers not actual discovery (and certainly not a genuine invitation to guess), but something subtler — a kind of satisfaction in assertion, in factuality, definiteness, in something noticed, verbalized, properly pinned down: the fee in feet. It’s the happiest of what we’ve come to call her openers, the start-up phrases she uses, needs, to propel her into the enterprise of speech. Some of these are brief and commonplace: a protracted «well perhaps, a „but“ or „and“. Listen, however, and you realize they don’t work like other people’s ands and buts. „And“ doesn’t announce an addition; „but“ doesn’t introduce a qualification or contrast. „Because“, a very frequent opener, heralds no assertion of causality, though Jessy understands cause and effect very well. It’s just another word from the start-up grab bag, establishing a holding pattern while she gets together what she will say next, reminding us, as we wait for the words to come, of the brain-based difficulty she experiences in shifting from one stage of speech to the next.
Other openers, more elaborate, share some of the enthusiasm of „Guess what!“ „I can’t believe it!“ she’ll
