pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon… There was no hesitation, no need for practice or repetition. They spoke the words once; thereafter she simply knew them. Six months later she asked me for ‘hep
We had not been able to teach her any colour words until that fruitful summer of her fifth birthday, although of course we had named colours before, as we had named shapes. As soon as she did learn them, however, she used them to record the niceties of a colour sense more acute than even we had suspected. [19] ‘
There were many such abstract words she could have learned, but I was concentrating on the human, the ordinary and familiar. Like the Victorian governess whose charge described the shape of the earth as an oblate spheroid, I thought that it was much
As we observed Elly’s developing speech, it seemed divided into words she could learn instantly once they were pointed out to her, and words she could not learn at all. For a long time there seemed to be no middle ground. What she was able to grasp were absolute terms, whether concrete or abstract — those that reflected concepts that could be defined and understood in themselves. ‘Box’, ‘cat’, ‘giraffe’. ‘Rectangle’, ‘number’, ‘letter’. What she could not understand were relational terms — those that must absorb their full meaning from the situations in which they occur — situations in which the human element plays a part. Elly acquired the word ‘man’ a year before she learned the name of any specific man — ‘man’ is an absolute concept. Once you know the word for a being with short hair and trousers, you need understand no more; from then on, men as such will be recognizable. ‘Man’ is absolute and abstract, but particular men are people, to whom one relates — if one does. ‘Teacher’ is a word which, like ‘man’, is the product of abstraction, but it is first learned in a relational situation: ‘my teacher’. Similarly for ‘sister’, ‘friend’, or ‘home’. It is characteristic of the average child that he learns concepts best in situations in which he can find a personal relation. With Elly, the personal relation seemed at best irrelevant, at worst a hindrance. We wanted to give her words that would enable her to function in the familiar world of a small child. But it was we who defined what a child should find familiar; Elly did not see it our way. Which was more familiar to her, a rectangle or a friend? Her sense of what was important, or unimportant, was simply different from our own.
I recall her, some months past five, looking at a Dick, Jane, and Sally pre-reader with the familiar pictures in series. Dick is painting a chair, in four stages. He has a brush and a can of red paint. I am trying to encourage Elly’s new ability to learn names. Pointing to the picture, I say ‘boy’, and meet with comprehension; I then say ‘Dick’. Elly reacts instantly with unusual pleasure; she smiles, she bounces up and down, she repeats the word, she applies it to the succeeding pictures. I am pleased too. For her to learn a personal name so fast is unheard of. But suddenly she gets up and goes to the wall. It is painted blue. ‘Dick,’ she says, with emphasis and satisfaction. She moves into another room, goes to another wall, a pink one this time. ‘Dick.’ I realize what I should have known; what she has abstracted is not the boy’s name, but the concept of ‘paint’, which is also inherent in the picture series, and which to her is both more interesting and more available than the ‘simple’, ‘direct’ idea of a person with a name.
Elly’s weakness in understanding human situations was especially marked in her difficulties with personal pronouns. She was six before she used any pronouns at all. This was not as surprising as it might have been; instinctively, in search of sure comprehension, we had spoken of ourselves and her by name, as one does to a two- year-old. But when we did begin, deliberately, to substitute ‘Would
There was no confusion or ambiguity in this usage. My experience does not support the conjecture of some psychiatrists that this phenomenon is a sign of the weakness of the ego and the vagueness of its borders. Elly knew who she was. She was ‘you’. The usage was exact, denotative, certain. The whole family understood it. It simply reversed the usual meaning.
It is perfectly logical, when one considers it. Elly thinks her name is ‘you’ because everyone calls her that. No one ever calls her ‘I’. People call themselves ‘I’, and as a further refinement Elly began to call them ‘I’ herself. The reversal of meaning seems nearly impervious to teaching; now, at eight, when Elly says ‘I like that’ it means not that she herself likes it but that her interlocutor does. What can I do? I can tell her to say ‘kiss me’ and reinforce it by kissing her; I can refuse to give her a shove in the swing until she says ‘push me’. But these rare ways of dramatizing the correct usage cannot hold their own against the hundreds of incorrect reinforcements that every day provides. ‘You made a mistake.’ I say, and Elly replies, ‘You made a
This lack affected Elly’s acquisition of all the parts of speech. She learned nouns more easily than verbs simply because there are more nouns whose meaning does not depend on surrounding situations. On the veldt, in the zoo, or in an A B C book, a giraffe is a giraffe. ‘Go’ or ‘come’, however, is something else again. It is harder to draw a picture of a verb, as you will find if you try it. Since action requires an actor, and often an object acted upon as well, there is more than one meaning to be abstracted from the simplest verb-picture. Unlike a noun, a verb implies a situation. From it, Elly must draw out the right thing-right not in her terms but in ours. The Dick-paint episode illustrates the ambiguities inherent in pictures — themselves so much simpler than real situations. We soon discovered that the drawing by which we tried to teach ‘play’ might teach ‘swing’ or ‘girl’ instead.
But in spite of this difficulty, verbs slowly followed nouns into Elly’s speech. ‘Walk’, indeed, had been one of her first words, used though not comprehended, before she was two. Four years later it was joined by ‘look’, ‘jump’,