For as she grew, the problem of her speech took precedence over all the others. It was through speech that she must join the human race. Kanner had found no better indicator of future development than speech. Five was his year of decision. By her fifth birthday, Elly had in fact begun to develop communicative speech.
The reader will recall that, according to the count made the month she turned four, Elly had in her life spoken thirty-one different words, fewer than half of which were then in current use. In the course of a week she would speak no more than five or six. She responded to a number of routine commands. That was all.
This situation began to improve that year, the year we spent abroad. There was no sudden change; it happened gradually. Four months after her fourth birthday the word count had reached thirty-eight. More important, when I counted the different words she had spoken in a single week, I found twenty- one. Two months later, although only three new words had been added and she was still using about twenty words a week, they were by and large the same ones. Instead of the frustrating come-and-go of her earlier vocabulary, she was acquiring a core of speech on which we could depend.
Along with this came a new interest in getting us to name things — the letters in her alphabet set, the fruits and vegetables on the pretty curtain I had found for her to darken her bedroom and give us a little more sleep. She would try herself to say ‘strawberry’ or ‘celery’ — the barrier against imitation was at last breaking down. But she mouthed them so clumsily that they were nearly unintelligible even at the time, and totally unrecognizable out of context; they did not get included in the word- count.
All Elly’s speech was indistinct; only those who knew her well understood anything she said. She never pronounced a final consonant, and often the initial consonants were ambiguous or wrong. Words of more than one syllable were rare, and tended to turn into Polynesian, so that Becky’s name would come out Beh-Beh, recognizable only because Elly would perhaps be looking at her sister’s picture. In this indistinctness, as in so much else, there seemed a queer deliberateness. The first time I ever heard her say ‘all gone’ she said it distinctly; I could even hear the terminal ‘n’. I remembered the clear ‘scissors’ she spoke before she was two; I remembered her limpid ‘El-ly’. I smiled; she smiled back mischievously and said the words again, less distinctly. ‘Ah-gah.’ It was ‘ah-gah’ for years after that. Her pronunciation did not improve as she began to acquire words more easily; it grew worse. It was as if (as if) now she was beginning to talk she had still to maintain her reputation for unintelligibility, to obscure — to herself? to us? — the significance of her entry into the world. At this same time began a new phenomenon which, though unconnected with speech, seemed comparable to her verbal indistinctness. Often, now, she would squint up her eyes, sometimes to the point of actually walking around blind. This would last a few seconds — at most a minute. Her face would have a little smile on it. The action seemed to express a kind of separateness, now she was becoming one of us, and yet it was a game of withdrawal rather than withdrawal itself. She kept it up, with decreasing frequency, over the years — a teasing game which denies withdrawal while affirming it, since it is done with our reaction in mind. We suspect — we cannot know — that the indistinctness of her speech has been similarly functional.
When Elly was two months short of her fifth birthday, the number of words on her vocabulary list was up to fifty-one, more than half in current use. That list was the last I made. That summer she began to learn words rapidly, and by Christmas of that year — the year of our return home — it was clear that there was in effect no limit on the number of common nouns she could acquire. That barrier was down. Anything she could see, actual or pictured, we could name and she could remember and identify. Anything — from aardvark to zebra. Familiarity made no difference. If I had shown her, at bedtime, a unicorn or a hippogriff, she would have known the words next morning. The problem now was no longer to add words to her vocabulary, but to extend the kinds of words she used and to combine them into larger units of meaning.
As she added word to word, her progress seemed astonishing. It hardly seemed that this could be the same Elly who for five years, of all the words we spoke to her, had retained so few. Yet it was. If we had expected that, now Elly had become open to words, everything would be different, our expectations were disappointed. Elly learned new words with the ease of the normal two-year-old she had never been. But she did not learn to talk like a normal two-year-old.
I have just said that there were no limitations on the number of nouns she could acquire. But even among nouns, the easiest words to learn, there were severe limitations on kind. She could learn immediately a word like ‘igloo’ and remember it, although its relevance to her own experience was nonexistent. She could learn and accurately apply the words ‘oak’, ‘elm’, and ‘maple’. Yet words which were, one would think, much closer to her experience she could not understand or learn. Such terms as ‘home’, ‘sister’, ‘grandmother’, ‘teacher’, ‘friend’, or ‘stranger’ were beyond her at five; ‘friend’ and ‘stranger’ are beyond her today. Proper names she acquired with a slowness that seemed clearly related to the weakness of affect. A name, after all, defines the importance of a person, his individual significance. Except for ‘mama’, in occasional use, and ‘da-da’, which made a few rare appearances, Elly got through her first five years without naming a single member of the family. Crude approximations began to appear that fruitful summer of her fifth birthday; in a few months, ‘Sara’, ‘Becky’, ‘Matt’, and ‘Jill’ (the much loved mother’s-helper) were semi-intelligible and in frequent use. We could refer to each other by name and Ellywould comprehend — ‘Go to Sara.’ We could add some of her new nouns: ‘Take the doll to Jill.’ People were beginning to be worth naming, although the familiar resistance was still there. At school she hardly looked at the children; she gave no sign that she distinguished them at all. One day, however — she was about five and a half and had been in the class three months — the teacher tried an experiment. Arranging the children in a circle, she asked, ‘Elly, where’s Mark?’ Elly, head down, eyes on the floor, jabbed a finger, not at Mark, but in his direction. ‘Where’s Andrea?’ Another jab. ‘Where’s Sue?’ Another. There were thirteen children. Elly, it turned out, knew them all by name.