and ‘run’, and later, in her seventh year, by such words as ‘give’, ‘move’, ‘push’, ‘open’, ‘shut’, ‘cut’, ‘hurt’ — words easily illustrated in pictures or in action. The children, my good co-therapists, taught her ‘cough’, ‘laugh’, ‘cry’, ‘scream’, and ‘burp’; she and they took a mischievous delight in testing, usually at the dinner table, her ability to perform these actions on command. ‘Die,’ they would say, and Elly, gagging and choking, would collapse on to the floor. Other verbs were more immediately useful. By the time she was eight she responded to ‘say’ — ‘Say “butter”, not “buh-buh”,’ — and within a few months she used the verb herself. I found no way of illustrating ‘see’; Elly was seven before she acquired it, as a kind of tributary of ‘look’, which by that time she could both understand and recognize in print. ‘Hear’ is even worse; I’m not sure she comprehends it even today, and she does not use it. ‘Know’ and ‘understand’ are as yet beyond her grasp, although for three years I have responded to an unintelligible pronunciation with ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t understand that’. Such nearly indefinable words as ‘have’, put’, ‘take’, and ‘get’ are only now coming into use, and their boundaries overlap in distorted ways. She may suggest, if Daddy is sick, that ‘Daddy ha’ broken arm’, using ‘have’ correctly — only to follow it up with ‘Daddy gi’ temperature hundred’. And by another strange reversal of normal learning order, these simple words, which children absorb from the environment long before they can manage the symbolic representation of them, Elly has learned only when she was shown them in writing. The visual experience of recognizing letter-combinations has focused her attention on words of which, although she heard them constantly, she seemed unconscious. She had never spoken the word
It is not surprising, then, that Elly made do for years without the verbs that cluster around the ideas of affection, desire, and need. The words ‘I wanna’ characterize the small child, but this child who at two wanted nothing was six before she spoke the word ‘want’ — of course without the ‘I’. In those long intervening years, her desires, never numerous, were conveyed, first by gesture, then — in the expansion of speech at age five — by naming what she wanted. That she should be able to ask for some-thing in words seemed great progress; we hoped — I think we expected — that the realization that language was power would bring with it further appreciation of the joys of communication. And it is true that now, nearing nine, she has a new flexibility in requests; at a single recent mealtime she used four different patterns, not only the primitive ‘Peanut butter?’ but also ‘Eh’ [Elly] ha’ vanilla yogurt?’ — ‘Nee[d] egg?’ — and ‘Wan’ pie?’ If words fail to communicate, as with her indistinctness they often do, she will occasionally, if asked, pronounce them better; more likely, she will do as she did at two and a half — lead you to the wanted object, or make your hand approach it. Certainly there is progress here — but the reader who reflects how many ways there are to ask for something, and how often children make use of them, will realize how far there is to go.
And if ‘want’ and ‘need’ came so slowly, what of the verbs whose function it is directly to express emotion? ‘Love’ and ‘like’ lagged behind ‘want’; although we of course made a point of telling Elly we liked, loved her, she was nearly seven before she herself used the words. Remembering Annie Sullivan, imagining how she made love real to Helen in her prison, we had accompanied word with act, and Elly ‘understood’ it. My journal entry records: ‘ “Love” now freely used. Means “hug”, “caress”. Will she extend to its full meaning?’ Two years later I am still not sure of the answer.
If Elly picked up few words for the positive emotions, for negative ones she acquired fewer still. I remember Becky at eighteen months frightening us with the intensity of her ‘Go away!’ Elly has never said anything like that. To deal with the things she doesn’t like she has developed nothing beyond ‘no’ and the anxious, edged voice of her wordless years. I did not think of teaching her ‘hate’, for reasons that, if not wise, are at least obvious. She does use ‘don’t like’, but in a way that well illustrates the complex of difficulties confronting us. Beginning with ‘no like’, which though primitive was clear and useful, she progressed to the more conventional expression. But ‘don’t like’ is a complex form of words, combining with a contracted negative the irregularities of the verb ‘do’; its shifts through ‘doesn’t’, ‘don’t you’, etc. , can be reproduced only by a child whose brain has already recorded their patterns. Elly’s lazy mouth converts the phrase into ‘like’, preceded by a virtually inaudible ‘n’, thus shearing it of the negative which is its primary indicator of meaning. [21] The words are rendered useless; even to me they are intelligible only in certain contexts and with great good luck. But Elly does not seem to feel the loss; it is a phrase she can do without. Simple avoidance is enough.
The same relational problems affected her acquisition of adjectives — if anything, more severely than nouns and verbs. Her first adjectives have already been described — the colour and shape words she learned so readily. ‘Big’ and ‘little’, being relative terms, came less easily. ‘Long’ and ‘short’, ‘near’ and ‘far’, were harder still. She is exploring comparatives now, with a kind of fascination; at bedtime, as I turn off the light, she says ‘dark, darker, darkest’. But she is nearing nine years old. The most striking lack, however, was of course in adjectives that express affect, that should convey her reactions to the world around her. Imagine how important the word ‘bad’ is in the ordinary three-year-old’s vocabulary, and then imagine a child with a vocabulary of hundreds of different words who has never needed the idea enough to pull a sound for it out of the environment into her own use. Elly’s first use of ‘bad’ (and its companion ‘good’) did not occur until she was six years and four months old; the month before she had learned not only ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ but ‘left’ and ‘right’, concepts which mothers and first-grade teachers know are not easy. The sequence seemed symbolic. I was tempted to elevate it into a definition: an autistic child is one who finds the concepts ‘left’ and ‘right’ more easily available than ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The autistic child is one who, having minimized its interaction with the world, feels no need for words to express opinions about it. When small, it does not request. As it grows, it does not evaluate. ‘No’ is enough.
Elly, at any rate, for years existed in apparent comfort without any value words at all, and though at length she found some uses for ‘good’ and ‘bad’, she has not made much of them. Language for her remains a mode of identification, a means of labelling phenomena; she is as yet not able to use it to express emotion. Small children say ‘bad’ with every gradation of fear and fury; Elly now says ‘bad’ too. But she says it with serene pleasure, to set a phenomenon in its proper category: ‘Bad can,’ she says as she collects beer cans from the beach. ‘Bad dog,’ she remarks, surveying an overturned garbage can. Elly does not care for dogs. If one comes too close she clings to me; if it jumps up she whimpers. But it would never occur to her to verbalize her emotion. She would not say ‘bad dog’ then.
For all her colour sense, she does not say ‘pretty’, ‘lovely’, or ‘beautiful’, all words which she hears often. Nor does she say ‘ugly’. She gets more mileage out of ‘dodecagon’ and ‘carnation-pink’. She has acquired ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but only in the unambiguous, objective sense of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (‘Wrong foot’, she says, deliberately putting left shoe on right foot). She enjoys using them; she has always been amused by mistakes. The summer she turned seven she acquired ‘sad’ and ‘happy’; she sang the ‘don’t be sad’ song the children made for her, and when I drew a sad face and a happy one, Elly herself volunteered ‘mouth down’ and ‘mouth up’. She knew what sad and happy looked like. Perhaps she had known for a long time, as she had known curved and straight; perhaps not. At any rate, the words had made the ideas usable, and now and then she used them. We and the children would reinforce them by simple dramatics. We’d say ‘Sara is sad’, and Sara would cry crocodile tears, to Elly’s amusement. Elly would say ‘Be happy’, and Sara would brighten up. The comprehension of these crude approximations of emotion was light-years beyond her old imperviousness. Yet they bore the same relation to the subtleties of actual emotions as a road map bears to the colours and forms of a living landscape.
‘Young/old’ and the adverbs ‘fast/slow’ came as she neared eight. ‘Funny’ she got from a word-card; though she laughs a lot, it applies as yet only to clowns. I taught her ‘tired’ and ‘resting’; she picked up ‘sick’, and ‘feel better’. A skimpy list, and I may have overlooked a word or two that should be on it. But it is virtually complete. If she had said — or shown signs of comprehending — anything like ‘worried’, ‘friendly’, ‘dangerous’, ‘angry’, ‘mad’, ‘afraid’, ‘scared’, or ‘nice’, be sure I would have remembered it.
Prepositions are by definition words that show relationships. As late as six and a half Elly comprehended no prepositions, and of course used none. By this time she was well able to respond to such simple commands as ‘Bring me the pencil’ — but in spite of her uncanny sense of orientation, she was still unable to understand the simple descriptions that answer the question‘Where is it?’ — a question that she never asked. Where is the pencil?
