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 should have had to look for a book to give us clues. As it was, there must be, of course, many tricks that speech therapists know that he did not hit upon. We presumed in this, as we presumed in most other things where we did not seek professional help. But Elly could have been reached, at this time, only by a most unusual speech therapist; she was already good friends with her father. She could sit by him at bedtime, bathed, warm, and snug, and accept his fingers in her mouth. Eventually — perhaps even this year — Elly will be able to benefit from professionally administered speech therapy. In the meantime, her father and she make good progress.
Not remarkably good; in this, as in other things, what Elly learns in one context is only slowly extended into another. Her new clarity seemed less for use than for display. In the framework of the game, marshmallows were a worthwhile compensation for the effort required. But that effort was more than she cared to expend for the doubtful rewards of communication. Yet as months passed the effects of the marshmallow game did begin to rub off on to ordinary speech; at her seventh-birthday visit the psychiatrist remarked he could understand ninety percent of what she said. (At five, when he first saw her, she said little and he had been able to understand nothing. ) We can count on simple intitial consonants now, and many final ones. Sometimes we even get one in the middle. One day, I think, pronunciation will no longer be a major bar to her intelligibility.
Yet pronunciation, however important it might be to Elly’s contact with others, was a matter of detail. It affected single sounds, or sounds in combination. But in our work with Elly, behind every approach to a specific problem lay a decision which would affect not isolated words and word groups but everything we said. How should we speak to Elly if we wanted her to believe in the possibility of mutual communication? If some of what Elly said was still unintelligible to us, we could not forget that most of what we said was unintelligible to her. We must consider our own speech as well as hers.
We could tell when Elly understood us and when she did not. If she did, she acted appropriately or jumped up and down in enthusiasm. Incomprehension brought indifference or a clearly inappropriate response. Of course we had in the back of our minds the stories everyone knows, of children who had seemed to hear nothing and yet were found to have recorded everything; the social worker at the Institute had suggested that Elly might understand far more than she let on. Even then this had seemed improbable, much as we would have liked to believe it. In the years since, we have watched for evidence of hidden comprehension and found none. It has been only in the past year that we have seen her pick up anything out of conversation not pointed directly at her, even its general subject. As she sits with us at dinner, as she moves among the children on the playground, she is still surrounded by a foreign tongue. Like a tourist in his first weeks abroad, she can understand what she expects to hear, if it is unambiguous, is clearly addressed to her, and falls largely within her own vocabulary. We all know the difference between our hotel French and the French the waiters speak to each other. I have heard Elly as she imitates me on the telephone. Giggling she says ‘Tah. Te tah. Pah pee pee pee pah.’ The syllables suggest how meaningless to her is the sound of most speech.
Of course we did not want our speech to be meaningless to our daughter; that she should regard speech as at least potentially intelligible was our overriding concern. It was this that led us to a decision that many people will find questionable. We decided that if we wanted Elly to believe that speech had meaning, we must speak to her in her own language.