that requires an open-ended answer — one that asks her to reach into the great variety of her surroundings and come up with something that fits. We can ask ‘How old is Granddad?’ and get a precise answer, for Elly is fascinated by ages and never forgets one. We can ask ‘Is Granddad upstairs?’ and get a correct yes or no. If we ask ‘Where’s Granddad?’ however, we will get no answer. Pointing at a person close by we can ask ‘Who’s that?’ But we cannot ask ‘Who’s your teacher?’ or ‘Who’s that in the kitchen with Sara?’ We are even farther from being able to ask her ‘What did you do at school today?’ or even ‘What did you have for lunch?’
She herself never asks a question — for the ‘Hot dog?’ or ‘You like a cookie?’ or ‘Gi’ candy?’ are not true questions, since their expected response does not consist in information but action. Though I taught her to answer ‘What’s that?’ a year ago, she never asks it. She never asks ‘When are we going downtown?’ though she will say ‘Downtown?’ as a request. The powerful word ‘Why?’ — which introduces a far more complex kind of question — Elly cannot comprehend. Most crippling of all, for we need the words daily, we cannot ask her ‘What do you want?’ or ‘What’s the matter?’ If she cries, if she shows anxiety or tension, in spite of her hundreds — it may be thousands — of words, we must still guess why, as when she was two years old.
This, then, has been the situation in Elly’s second four years — speech rudimentary and distorted, but constantly expanding in scope and usefulness, and increasingly open to modification from without. It is clear already that Elly’s speech has not been the free product of spontaneous development, that we have interfered constantly in the process as we have tried to teach what in a normal child needs no teaching. We are amateurs in speech therapy, as in all other therapy; we can guess how much we do not know. But we do know something about teaching speech, not in lessons, but in a total environment, and we know what approaches have worked for us. Most of these have already been suggested. It may, however, help someone if I review here, explicitly and in detail, the principles by which we worked and the methods we found workable.
I will begin with the most obvious, the method everyone suggests. ‘You should try not giving it to her until she asks for it.’ And of course we tried that, and tried again. So did other people; the teacher at the English nursery school tried withholding a sweet until Elly said ‘please’. Elly was four and a half then. It didn’t work for the teacher, as it hadn’t worked earlier for us. All anyone got then was indifference, or, if the object was really desired, bewilderment and frustration. But children grow, and a year later it
Above all, she must not conclude that speech was an untrustworthy instrument. If she must find her own speech to be effective, she must also be sure that ours gave a true account of reality. By this I do not mean merely that we could not lie to her. That goes without saying. But beyond that, it became second nature for us to examine our statements to make sure they would not be disproved by events. If we said, ‘Grandma is coming at five,’ it must be true; if there were the slightest uncertainty, we should say nothing. If I promised a trip to the store I must make it whatever the inconvenience, and since I knew that, I weighted my predictions and promises carefully. In those first years of Elly’s speech I had still no words in which to explain change in circumstances, and the meaning of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ was out of reach. We are only now beginning to focus on the modes of speech that deal with uncertainty; we could not afford to perplex her with them then.
The second approach to speech was also an outgrowth of something old and obvious, the practice of naming things, which had finally, in Elly’s sixth year, begun to get results. Naming of course remains a primary method, but its uses are plain and need no rehearsal. Less obvious are the possibilities of reinforcing spoken identification with the written word. It would not have occurred to me to do this had not Elly spontaneously been interested in letters. She had made her first mysterious ‘E’ at three and a half, and had chuckled when, a few months later, I had written ‘Elly’ on her hand; the day after we returned home from abroad, she had found her old letter set and spontaneously spelled ELLY, ingeniously inverting the number seven in order to provide the second L, which the set lacked. Clearly she liked letters, and since I did so much drawing with her it was natural that I should begin to put written labels on the things I drew. I printed slowly and clearly; her eye followed the word as it took shape. I wrote the label before I drew the picture, hoping anticipation would tempt her into recognition. And by her choice, not mine, I made the same word and picture over and over. It was thus not surprising that at five and a half she could recognize ‘house’ and write ‘window’. In the next year, by a series of games incorporating successive steps forward, [25] she learned to recognize sixty words on cards, initially with pictures, then without.
I cannot explain the strange reversal of the natural order of events in which a child learns speech through the written word.
But this is not the only instance in which I have understood traits in Elly by looking into myself. There are people, and I am one of them, whose comprehension is better oriented to the written than to the spoken word, who can hear something and not retain it, but who when they see it written will learn and remember. The configuration of letters itself seems to crystallize the word for them, makes them able to hear its pronunciation, and renders its spelling an inseparable part of its identity. I could imagine that in some such way it worked for Elly. Perhaps one natural proof-reader begets another.
Yet though the printed word came easy, I had no startling success with reading as such. When it became clear that there was no upper limit on the number of word-cards I could teach Elly to recognize I stopped adding new ones. Elly could not yet understand the story of the Three Bears when I read it to her; how could she read herself? I did not want to see her ‘reading’ degenerate into rote recognition; it was important that her words not outrun her comprehension, since reading, at this time, was valuable not in itself but because it intensified the experience of speech. So instead of increasing her recognition vocabulary, I started putting the words she already knew together in short sequences, picture above word to make sure the symbols kept their meaning. ‘Elly [of course I had made a card for that] hurt finger red blood cry.’ I could pull her through the sequence, but slowly, slowly; the words she could memorize overnight and recognize instantly were much less available when meaningfully connected. She liked them less, too; she no longer seemed to enjoy our bedtime word sessions, and she would not recognize her familiar words when pointed out in a book — indeed it was hard to get her to look at them. I found another bedtime game and put the cards aside. Meaningful reading still lay far in the future. The cards, the words I printed, could only point towards that. Their present use was valuable enough: to focus her attention on sound and meaning. Like our drawings, like our dramatizations, they intensified her experience of speech. Without the cards, without my ready pencil, Elly’s understanding of verbs would have been much delayed. We would have had to wait — who knows how long? — for ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘is’. I do not think she would have understood ‘in the box’ to this day.
Through letters, too, we could approach speech by a third way. The look of a word could be used to help correct the indistinctness of her pronunciation, more noticeable than ever now she talked more and there were more words to confuse. Letters could direct her attention to a fuzzy initial consonant or a nonexistent final one. They could, that is, if she could understand how letters function. I had failed to teach her less difficult lessons than this one, which required not only comprehension of symbols but the precise discrimination of sounds to which she seemed so oblivious. It was fortunate, then, that the function of letters lay in the category of things that Elly learned without teaching. I had said ‘E for Elly’, ‘B for Becky’, without expectations, hardly thinking what I was doing. I had not expected that Elly would soon be volunteering ‘c for cup’ and ‘b for bed’. Simply, she liked letters, as she liked shapes and colours. She liked them very much — enough, even, to think about them. Intuitively, in spite of her own mispronunciations, she guessed their simple significations. Sometimes she would give unasked the initial letters of words she neither knew by sight nor could pronounce; her ‘S’ was a muffled distortion between T and D, but we knew its sound well enough to recognize it and be astonished when she said ‘S for Stephen’.
Using letters and pictures together, her father developed a pronunciation game. Recalling the technique of immediate reinforcement that underlies all teaching machines, he would draw a picture or print a word, then give Elly a tiny marsh-mallow if (and only if) she could clarify her pronunciation of it. Under this stimulus, he confirmed what we had always suspected: that Elly could pronounce a great deal more clearly than she did. Elly’s pronunciation at two was, we think, potentially normal, but four years of semi-mutism had taken a toll; there were now real difficulties in sound formation. David, whose linguistic gift is oral as well as visual, was able to analyse his own pronunciation processes well enough to assist Elly informing the problem sounds. If he had not been, we
