The Siege

the bookcase. Useful words, these; in her seventh year I decided they were too useful to wait for. I couldn’t find a set of pictured preposition word-cards, [22] so I made my own. With these, Elly learned the printed words overnight, the spoken ones in a day or two. I taught only four or five of the most useful and easiest to illustrate; she understood them in commands, and gradually began to introduce a few into her own language. Such short words as ‘in’ and ‘on’ are easily slurred, however, and hard for the hearer to recognie. Thought Elly’s primitive ‘spoon [is on the] table’ gave way to ‘spoon-uh-table’, her effective communication had not advanced very far. Later — after seven — when she understood ‘say’, I could ask her to ‘say it better’, but that was in the future. And even then there was a great gulf between speaking intelligibly on request and speaking intelligibly habitually.

But the problems presented by these words were easy com-pared to the problem of conveying the untidy miscellany of adverbs, articles, and conjunctions, the unsung heroes that give our conversation its preciser meanings. These words are relational in their very nature. But. If. Whether. Maybe. Because. Soon. When. Yet. Like. Except. The words seem unimportant until you try to imagine doing without them, and simple until you try to find ways to teach them. Teach them? No one teaches such words — the small child seems to draw them out of the air. But Elly did not even pick up ‘and’, the simplest connective of them all. She was seven before I thought of a way to convey it, and characteristically it was in terms of colour. Our neighbours had a grey house with a blue trim; Elly called it ‘blue-grey house’. Though Elly might verbally confuse blue- grey with blue-and-grey, I knew she was incapable of confusing them in actuality. So I drew two houses, coloured them, labelled them, and pronounced the words. From then on she could understand ‘and’, and read it on occasion. When pressed, she could even produce a sound to represent it. But who can draw ‘if’ or ‘when’? Who can draw ‘but’ itself?

It is words like these that convert vocabulary into language. A collection of words — even a large collection — is not equivalent to speech. They must be combined.

The average child begins, like Elly, with isolated words, and sometime between a year and a half and two starts to put these words together. Elly was nearing six before we heard her speak two words in combination. ‘Laura girl,’ she said of the small child next door, and this kind of statement, three years later, remains characteristic of her speech. As with a normal child, but much more slowly, two-word combinations gave way to larger aggregates — three, six… as the years passed she might sometimes say eight words together, with obvious logical connection. But these were not normal sentences — the almost total absence of articles, conjunctions, prepositions, verb-inflections for tense [23] or person, and the verb ‘to be’ ensures that though her language grows in complexity she is still speaking pidgin. And it is distorted pidgin at that, for Elly’s grasp of word order, in English the most powerful indicator of meaning, is very weak. When a normal child says ‘Give Becky a green lollipop’, we know who is to get the candy; it has been signalled by the word order. When Elly says it, however (dropping, of course, the article), it may mean what it appears to, but may also mean that Becky is doing the giving. ‘Dr Mama doll gi’ medicine’ is meant to mean that Dr Mama is dosing the doll. The order of the words is scrambled, and the listener must interpret from the context. Elly will say today, ‘No four find daddy peanut’; it means ‘I can’t find four big peanuts’. Responding to a picture of a hat on a table she may get it right — or she may say ‘table on a hat’. She says she will ‘grow be ten’ — I tell her, as I can these days, ‘Don’t forget the “to” — “grow to be eleven”.’ Good-naturedly she does as she is told: ‘Elly grow be to eleven,’ she says. Her word order is correct more often than not, certainly — but that is not very much to say of the extremely simple speech of an eight-year-old child.

Elly has been a stranger in her world, and the course of her acquisition of speech has not been so very different from that of a tourist learning a foreign tongue. He learns the nouns first and easily: the things that can be pointed out. Verbs and adjectives come more slowly — they would come more slowly still if he were not helped, as Elly could not be, by the possibility of referring- them to equivalents in his own language. Word order and syntax he acquires more slowly still; simple correctness may be the work of months. Years later he is still discovering new delicacies of situational appropriateness and unsuspected shades of meaning. Those who realize how difficult is the process of learning to feel at home in another language will be able to imagine a little girl experiencing the same difficulties in settling into her own, and marvel at the linguistic achievement of ordinary children between the ages of one and four.

One learns a language more quickly and better, of course, if one has reason to do so, if there are things one wants to find out and people with whom one wants to communicate. People learn a language because they want and need to use it, and if they do not want or need to very much they do not learn it very well. It is impossible to discuss Elly’s slow acquisition of language without considering the part played by motivation. The old familiar weakness, inertia, and isolation had not lost their relevance.

Elly was still — is still — not very good at wanting things. The patterns of her childhood persisted; a word was more often than not used, not to ask for an object, or even to call attention to it, but simply to name it. ‘Milk’, she would say. There is milk. Milk exists. No more. In the general expansion of language in her fifth year, she began, as I have said, to use words as requests. ‘Milk?’ Thrilled, delighted, we fulfilled her requests the instant she made them; we would show her that language worked, that speaking sounds made good things happen. It helped. She requested more things, more often. She requests things now. But not very many things, really, and not very often. The discovery that words could alter circumstances did not affect a miraculous opening of the possibilities of communication, like Helen Keller’s first understanding of ‘water’. It was an episode, like another, in her slow progress. She learned names, as I have said. But what are names for? They are to identify, indeed, but also to call, and a child will use them as much for the second purpose as for the first. ‘Mom? Mom? Mama.’ The sounds ring in my ears. In sixteen years I have become attuned to the frequency of each child. I can hear the voices in my imagination, I can hear them through walls, but Elly’s voice is not among them. She has not yet called me. She has not called her father, her sisters, her brother, except — the exception is as instructive as the generalization — recently, when we have been able to tell her to call one of them to dinner. Then, imitating the very intervals of our voices, she will do as she is told. ‘Sa-ra!Beck-y!’ But she is not calling for any purpose of her own. Recently, too, she has developed a new game for herself. After eight years, she has found out my name. ‘Cla-ra!’ she sings — the characteristic descent, fifth to third, of a loud call into the distance. I am right there in the room, but that makes no difference. She isn’t calling me really, as becomes clear in a moment: she puts forward her doll Deedee (imagine it, she is naming her dolls now!). ‘Deedee “Cla-ra!.’ It’s Deedee who is calling me, not Elly. People do call other people. After eight years you notice it, imitate it, dramatize it. But you yourself don’t do it. When Elly is actually looking for me she doesn’t call ‘Clara’, or ‘Mama’ either — she wanders from room to room saying ‘hello?’ Marvellous progress, we think, since for all these years, though she moved with me almost always when I was in the house, she didn’t look for me when she mislaid me, or say hello, either. It looks as if — when she is nine perhaps — she will one day be ready to call my name.

Speech is used not only for requests but for responses to the requests of others, for the answering of questions, the conveying of information. Although in her sixth year Elly could respond to a wide variety of commands (though nothing like as wide as a normal child), she could answer no questions of any kind. By six and a half she could say ‘no!’ if you asked her did she want more meat; this is a form of common self-defence, and perhaps it is the natural first response. As months passed the ability broadened: ‘Is Matt a girl?’ ‘Is Becky’s dress blue?’ ‘No!’ — with gay laughter, as always, over the ludicrous mistake. It was not until she was seven that we taught her to answer ‘yes’. [24] She can now answer correctly any question that expects a yes-or-no answer, if she comprehends the terms. She can also answer a variety of other questions that expect an answer of a prescribed form. Some of these are apparently quite sophisticated: ‘What’s today?’ ‘What’s four times three?’ ‘How many — are there?’ The ability to answer each of these questions was not acquired spontaneously, but taught. I do not mean, of course, that I had to teach Elly what day it was or how to keep track of a number of objects. For things like that she did not need teaching. It had been apparent from the time of her cookie fixation, at four, that she could count, and by the time she was six she would look at a collection of objects in one of her number books and say ‘seven’ or ‘three’. Unasked, that is. She could not answer when I said ‘How many?’ It was the question itself she did not comprehend. When I realized the problem, which was not for a long time, I set myself to teach her the word-patterns of question and answer. I myself said ‘How many?’ and answered my own question, and asked her again. After I had done this for several days (every evening at the same time, with the same book), Elly could answer the question alone. Other question forms came more quickly, as Elly began to understand the routine, but there is still a very limited number of them (limited by my powers of invention, as well as Elly’s comprehension). Elly has picked up none of her own. Most significant of all, she can answer no question