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 did work. Not as well as one would hope; rather than make the effort Elly would still too often cry or do without. But that it worked at all seemed wonderful to us. Remembering Pavlov, we rewarded her requests instantly; I leapt to my feet in joy when, instead of pulling at my arm, she said ‘Get up, please.’ When she said ‘candy’, she got some. The effects on discipline and teeth were not wholly salutary; in trying to show her that speech worked we came uncomfortably close to demonstrating that you had only to speak to get what you asked for. We had to compromise. Yet we could not backtrack so far that she would conclude that words were not useful.
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.
25
I was encouraged to continue with simple reading by watching the work of the teachers at Dr Carl Fenichel’s League School for Seriously Disturbed Children. The welcome I received there was a model to show what help skilled professionals can give to parents. I watched for a full day a classroom of children as remote as Elly, and came away with new strength and ideas for months of work. Without this experience, and without the encouragement of Elly’s psychiatrist, I do not think I would have presumed to teach Elly reading.