Of course this was in fact no great decision, only a verbalization of what we had been doing for years, what most parents do intuitively as they talk to their babies and toddlers. Using short, familiar sentence patterns, they speak to them in words they can understand. They do not think about the subtle process by which words build into speech; they do not have to. Automatically, with no one’s conscious attention, the vocabulary and sentence patterns of the child’s speech come to approach the range and complexity of the parents’. Gradually the parents drop their unconscious simplifications, and somewhere between three and five it turns out that everybody is now talking English. But when Elly was five we were at the beginning of this process, not the end of it. Elly was not talking English, she was mouthing words. We had the choice of confronting her with sentence patterns of normal complexity and length and hoping she would come to understand them, or confining ourselves to those she was reasonably likely to find intelligible. We chose the latter course.
We talked pidgin, but we talked it with a difference. Though we wanted Elly to understand, we did not want to imprison her within a primitive language, but to help her move towards more refined and complex structures of meaning. This meant that our pidgin must be one step ahead of hers. But not much more than one; nothing we had seen of Elly had led us to believe in her capacity for any great leaps forward.
To give details of how we spoke to Elly is impossible here, but the general approach can be conveyed. It has been rather as if one applied the familiar method of the Dick-Jane-Sally readers to speech. The influential creators of Dick and Jane do not introduce new words in clusters, but one at a time. The new word is introduced in several contexts, it is repeated ad nauseam. No step in comprehension is omitted, even if it seems obvious, and to a verbally gifted child is obvious. Stages the average adult would skip over have been identified and incorporated into a programme that gradually leads the child to feel at home with a large number of printed words. The inventors of Dick and Jane know that many children will learn ‘go’ without being able to extrapolate to ‘goes’ and ‘going’, that ‘can’t’ and ‘cannot’ will seem to them totally different words. As it was in their reading, so it was in Elly’s speech.
I learned much from Dick and Jane. When talking to Elly I tried not to burden a sentence with more than one word I knew to be unfamiliar. I was prepared to repeat the sentence again and again; autistic children do not find repetition nauseating and their parents cannot afford to. I tried to remember to use the word or phrase soon after, in another simple context, and to use it the next day and the day after that.
I spoke to her in her own vocabulary and I used her syntax as well. I tried to use it in a more civilized form — but only slightly more civilized. The gap between ‘Elly go store?’ and ‘Elly, I’m going to the store now to get the eggs, do you want to come with me?’ is fifteen words and several constructions wide. I could not, I thought, bridge it all at once, so what I actually said was a compromise, and a compromise nearer to her terms than mine. [26]
We had at first expected that once she began to talk, Elly would begin to pick up language like a normal child. And she did pick up words — especially nouns — that we had not taught her. She was much slower to pick up constructions — so slow that at length we began to take a more active part in the process. In addition to speaking ourselves so she could understand us, we began to find ways to nudge her own expression ahead — not merely to speak simply to her, but deliberately to feed her new patterns of communication that she would find usable if she knew them. We did not begin this until her seventh year. We were for a long time primarily word-conscious, and it was not for some time that we thought of conveying whole statements by repetition, as one would teach a word. A few of these were superficially sophisticated, like the arithmetical sentences with ‘plus’ and ‘equals’ mentioned earlier in this chapter. Most, however, express simple ways of coping with the world — less simple, though, to Elly than the relations of arithmetic. ‘Don’t forget the —.’ ‘Don’t be sad, be happy.’ ‘Come back another day.’ ‘Oh, we made a mistake.’ ‘Never mind.’ Ideally we would have imagined what patterns she needed to deal with her experience and provided them. If I were writing a handbook for parents of autistic children that is what I would counsel them to do. But in fact we were seldom so conscious or so clever. Only recently have we addressed ourselves consciously to the problem of giving her the words to handle recurrent situations in her experience. It has worked well enough so that we wish we had had the wit to think of it earlier. Better than anything else, it has enabled us to cope with the situations of frustration and anxiety that occur when everything doesn’t go according to plan. Uncertainty exists, and we cannot protect her from it always. It is progress indeed when words can be not only a tool but a shield. This summer I developed the pattern ‘Sometimes buy candy, sometimes don't buy candy’, and it has proved possible to extend it. ‘Sometimes go to school, sometimes don’t go to school.’ ‘Sometimes we go home this way. .’ The words themselves are the first real help in dealing with autism’s severest emotional difficulty: the commitment to routine and repetition. Life must be orderly, its forms must repeat, yet they cannot always do so. We can’t always take the same route home, nor should we; we vary it deliberately. We have come far enough now, Elly and I together, so that the resulting anxiety can be mediated by words. ‘Sometimes…’ The familiar frame becomes the fixed point in the changing world and Elly will insist on its application. She motions to my mouth with the familiar gesture of a conductor cuing in the violins. If from contrariness or inattention I miss my entrance, she will supply the whole pattern herself, even if she is crying from disappointment because ‘sometimes don’t have candy’. The patterns are clumsy, but Elly is beginning to alter them herself to fit new situations. On Matthew’s birthday I remarked that ‘Matty is twelve’. ‘Sometimes Matty eleven, sometimes.’ and then, sensing that that couldn’t work, she substituted another stock pattern. ‘Matty eleven last night’
Elly’s speech is much improved. The psychiatrist says so, and so does everybody else. We can never be sure, however, that she would not have progessed further had we made the other choice — to let Elly find her own patterns, to speak English to Elly and wait for her to understand and imitate it. The teacher at Dr Fenichel’s school told me, ‘I always speak normally to them — they get it eventually.’ Perhaps Elly would have got it eventually, and got it better. With time at our backs, however, we chose for her a meaningful world sooner, even if worse.
We were more comfortable in our choice because Elly was of course in contact with other people who spoke naturally. She heard daily all degrees of speech between pidgin and English. Each person in the family spoke differently; we did not want an imposed uniformity. Since they wanted to be understood the children also spoke pidgin to her, but less carefully than I. Her father too was less in contact with the day-to-day expansions of her language; he spoke simply but with a wider vocabulary and in more conventional patterns. So did the mother’s-helpers. The teachers at the nursery school talked to her in the same language they would use to any three-year-old. My hope was that what she learned from my simple conversation would aid her to make sense of the wonderful variety of sound around her; others could build on my foundations.
26
As I typed these words, I received a call from the mother of an autistic child in a city half a continent away. She described the limits on her boy’s comprehension, how he could not reply if she said ‘Tell me’, but could respond if she said ‘Say the words’. The counsellor at the clinic she attended had overheard such an exchange and asked how she could expect the child to learn to talk if she herself talked such strange English to him. It is a natural response — to one who has not lived with the problem.