The Siege

by Clara Clairborne Park

  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.

  It has been speculated that what is impaired in children like Elly is the capacity for abstraction, and it is true that Elly was, and for the most part still is, incapable of giving meaning to words like ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘fear’, whether used as nouns in their full abstraction or more directly as verbs. But my experience suggests a different formulation — not in terms of abstract and concrete, but in terms of relative and absolute. It is true that an abstract word such as ‘fun’ was beyond her capacity. But she was equally slow to grasp that least abstract of entities, the particularity of a specific individual as manifest to sight and touch and expressed in a name. Moreover, she grasped with especial ease a whole class of word-concepts that are generally considered the product of abstraction, in that the mind in order to arrive at them must proceed from a number of individual experiences, abstract their significant common characteristics, and fix these in a word. Even at two and a half Elly had applied the general term ‘ball’ to objects as different as a flattened rubber oval and a sphere of perforated plastic. This was not very impressive, perhaps — until you reflect that at this time when she had only five or six words, one of them was a product of abstraction. (Balls that looked like balls did not elicit the word; Elly was responding to the concept, not the appearance.) At three and a half the idea of a circle was so clear in her mind that she had commandeered music to do duty for the word she did not know. At five and a half, when she was at last ready to learn words in quantity, she learned ‘triangle’, ‘square’, and ‘rectangle’ as easily as at three she had distinguished one block from another. The simple ideas behind the words ‘Where did Becky go?’ or ‘Do you like candy?’ — questions to which an average three-year-old can respond — were beyond her comprehension. But her teachers could say ‘Draw a red triangle, Elly,’ and she would do so. When she learned the other words for shape they came so easily it could hardly be called learning. Her sisters showed her them one summer morning, to amuse her: pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon… There was no hesitation, no need for practice or repetition. They spoke the words once; thereafter she simply knew them. Six months later she asked me for ‘heptagon’. I thought she’d said ‘hexagon’; those we sometimes drew and talked about. Not so. Making a heroic effort at clarity, she said ‘heptagon — seven sides!’ It was as if she had had the concepts for years and had been waiting for the words to describe them. And of course she had; when people had still been invisible to her she had responded to shape and colour. Rectangle, a diamond, a square — these words are nothing if not abstract. When ideas were significant to her, Elly had no difficulty with abstraction.

  We had not been able to teach her any colour words until that fruitful summer of her fifth birthday, although of course we had named colours before, as we had named shapes. As soon as she did learn them, however, she used them to record the niceties of a colour sense more acute than even we had suspected. [19] ‘Pink-orange! Green-blue!’ This at five — by seven, peacock-green and peacock-blue cars were carefully and enthusiastically distinguished. Colour was so important to her that I could use it to call attention to things she would not ordinarily notice. I would say ‘purple mountains’, ‘brown horse’, and Elly, who had little interest in animals and none in landscape, would see horse or mountain, which had now acquired significance from its colour, and learn the word for it. It was not, however, the particular thing which interested her, but the generalized notion of colour, which could be applied to any object.

  There were many such abstract words she could have learned, but I was concentrating on the human, the ordinary and familiar. Like the Victorian governess whose charge described the shape of the earth as an oblate spheroid, I thought that it was much nicer for a little girl to say that it was shaped like an orange. It was more than a year later that it occurred to me to teach her ‘curved’ and ‘straight’. Only one drawing was necessary. Again it had been the word, not the idea, that was lacking. Elly demonstrated that on one of our walks. As we approached a house we had not visited for a year or more, Elly suddenly spoke, loudly and intensely. ‘Curved stairs!’ I rang the bell in some excitement. I myself had never noticed the staircase, though I had been here more often than Elly. I might have known I could rely on her. As we entered the hall I saw that it swept up and around in a splendid curve. Certainly her capacity for making this kind of abstraction was not impaired. It was in fact so great that it had been able to sustain itself in her mind over months without the support of any words, to surface when they were supplied.

  As we observed Elly’s developing speech, it seemed divided into words she could learn instantly once they were pointed out to her, and words she could not learn at all. For a long time there seemed to be no middle ground. What she was able to grasp were absolute terms, whether concrete or abstract — those that reflected concepts that could be defined and understood in themselves. ‘Box’, ‘cat’, ‘giraffe’. ‘Rectangle’, ‘number’, ‘letter’. What she could not understand were
relational terms — those that must absorb their full meaning from the situations in which they occur — situations in which the human element plays a part. Elly acquired the word ‘man’ a year before she learned the name of any specific man — ‘man’ is an absolute concept. Once you know the word for a being with short hair and trousers, you need understand no more; from then on, men as such will be recognizable. ‘Man’ is absolute and abstract, but particular men are people, to whom one relates — if one does. ‘Teacher’ is a word which, like ‘man’, is the product of abstraction, but it is first learned in a relational situation: ‘my teacher’. Similarly for ‘sister’, ‘friend’, or ‘home’. It is characteristic of the average child that he learns concepts best in situations in which he can find a personal relation. With Elly, the personal relation seemed at best irrelevant, at worst a hindrance. We wanted to give her words that would enable her to function in the familiar world of a small child. But it was we who defined what a child should find familiar; Elly did not see it our way. Which was more familiar to her, a rectangle or a friend? Her sense of what was important, or unimportant, was simply different from our own.

  I recall her, some months past five, looking at a Dick, Jane, and Sally pre-reader with the familiar pictures in series. Dick is painting a chair, in four stages. He has a brush and a can of red paint. I am trying to encourage Elly’s new ability to learn names. Pointing to the picture, I say ‘boy’, and meet with comprehension; I then say ‘Dick’. Elly reacts instantly with unusual pleasure; she smiles, she bounces up and down, she repeats the word, she applies it to the succeeding pictures. I am pleased too. For her to learn a personal name so fast is unheard of. But suddenly she gets up and goes to the wall. It is painted blue. ‘Dick,’ she says, with emphasis and satisfaction. She moves into another room, goes to another wall, a pink one this time. ‘Dick.’ I realize what I should have known; what she has abstracted is not the boy’s name, but the concept of ‘paint’, which is also inherent in the picture series, and which to her is both more interesting and more available than the ‘simple’, ‘direct’ idea of a person with a name.

  Elly’s weakness in understanding human situations was especially marked in her difficulties with personal pronouns. She was six before she used any pronouns at all. This was not as surprising as it might have been; instinctively, in search of sure comprehension, we had spoken of ourselves and her by name, as one does to a two-year-old. But when we did begin, deliberately, to substitute ‘Would you’ for ‘Would Elly like a cookie?’ we realized the severity of the problem. The answer, at six, would be, not ‘yes’ (that came much later, not spontaneously, but as a result of careful teaching), or even ‘I like a cookie’, but a simpler echoing: ‘You like a cookie?’ This echolalia, complete to the rising intonation of the question, was, we knew, part of the autistic syndrome; autistic children who, unlike Elly, do speak at a normal age, still speak not flexibly, for communication, but like parrots. Elly had not shown that symptom earlier because she couldn’t talk that well. Now she could, and here it was. ‘Daddy gave you a present,’ I would say. And as time went on she did more than echo after us; she herself would volunteer the words, with full enjoyment of the fact of the gift. ‘Daddy give you a present.’ And now we recognized another specific characteristic of the speech of autistic children. In any statement, ‘you’ is the equivalent of ‘I’ or ‘me’.

  There was no confusion or ambiguity in this usage. My experience does not support the conjecture of some psychiatrists that this phenomenon is a sign of the weakness of the ego and the vagueness of its borders. Elly knew who she was. She was ‘you’. The usage was exact, denotative, certain. The whole family understood it. It simply reversed the usual meaning.

  It is perfectly logical, when one considers it. Elly thinks her name is ‘you’ because everyone calls her that. No one ever calls her ‘I’. People call themselves ‘I’, and as a further refinement Elly began to call them ‘I’ herself. The reversal of meaning seems nearly impervious to teaching; now, at eight, when Elly says ‘I like that’ it means not that she herself likes it but that her interlocutor does. What can I do? I can tell her to say ‘kiss me’ and reinforce it by kissing her; I can refuse to give her a shove in the swing until she says ‘push me’. But these rare ways of dramatizing the correct usage cannot hold their own against the hundreds of incorrect reinforcements that every day provides. ‘You made a mistake.’ I say, and Elly replies, ‘You made a mistake!’ ‘No, I didn’t make a mistake, you made a mistake.’ ‘You made a mistake!’ Everything one says makes it worse. Twice — on occasions a year apart — Elly has used ‘me’ correctly, to refer to herself. ‘Becky gave me a book,’ she said recently, the book in her hands. Hurrying to encourage her, I caught myself saying, ‘Yes, she did give you a book,’ thus destroying the effect I had meant to reinforce. I have come to wonder how it is that ordinary two-year-olds can grasp anything so subtle. Yet they do. As mothers know, many of them have this same difficulty as they begin talking, but it rights itself spontaneously in a few weeks. How? As a psychiatrist — not one of ours — remarked to me at a party, the correct use of the first- and second-person pronouns [20] cannot be grasped by logic. The social sense must take over and straighten things out — the sense, or complex of senses, that assesses the relations of people in a given situation, how they think of themselves, and consequently what words they use to identify themselves. Elly’s usage is rigidly consistent, severely logical. What it lacks is that social instinct which guides even the dullest of normal children in the labyrinth of personal relations.

  This lack affected Elly’s acquisition of all the parts of speech. She learned nouns more easily than verbs simply because there are more nouns whose meaning does not depend on surrounding situations. On the veldt, in the zoo, or in an A B C book, a giraffe is a giraffe. ‘Go’ or ‘come’, however, is something else again. It is harder to draw a picture of a verb, as you will find if you try it. Since action requires an actor, and often an object acted upon as well, there is more than one meaning to be abstracted from the simplest verb-picture. Unlike a noun, a verb implies a situation. From it, Elly must draw out the right thing-right not in her terms but in ours. The Dick-paint episode illustrates the ambiguities inherent in pictures — themselves so much simpler than real situations. We soon discovered that the drawing by which we tried to teach ‘play’ might teach ‘swing’ or ‘girl’ instead.

  But in spite of this difficulty, verbs slowly followed nouns into Elly’s speech. ‘Walk’, indeed, had been one of her first words, used though not comprehended, before she was two. Four years later it was joined by ‘look’, ‘jump’, and ‘run’, and later, in her seventh year, by such words as ‘give’, ‘move’, ‘push’, ‘open’, ‘shut’, ‘cut’, ‘hurt’ — words easily illustrated in pictures or in action. The children, my good co-therapists, taught her ‘cough’, ‘laugh’, ‘cry’, ‘scream’, and ‘burp’; she and they took a mischievous delight in testing, usually at the dinner table, her ability to perform these actions on command. ‘Die,’ they would say, and Elly, gagging and choking, would collapse on to the floor. Other verbs were more immediately useful. By the time she was eight she responded to ‘say’ — ‘Say “butter”, not “buh-buh”,’ — and within a few months she used the verb herself. I found no way of illustrating ‘see’; Elly was seven before she acquired it, as a kind of tributary of ‘look’, which by that time she could both understand and recognize in print. ‘Hear’ is even worse; I’m not sure she comprehends it even today, and she does not use it. ‘Know’ and ‘understand’ are as yet beyond her grasp, although for three years I have responded to an unintelligible pronunciation with ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t understand that’. Such nearly indefinable words as ‘have’, put’, ‘take’, and ‘get’ are only now coming into use, and their boundaries overlap in distorted ways. She may suggest, if Daddy is sick, that ‘Daddy ha’ broken arm’, using ‘have’ correctly — only to follow it up with ‘Daddy gi’ temperatur
e hundred’. And by another strange reversal of normal learning order, these simple words, which children absorb from the environment long before they can manage the symbolic representation of them, Elly has learned only when she was shown them in writing. The visual experience of recognizing letter-combinations has focused her attention on words of which, although she heard them constantly, she seemed unconscious. She had never spoken the word is until she was seven, when her kindergarten teacher asked her to write it. Her statements were (and for the most part still are) of the form ‘Becky girl’, ‘cup broken’ Once she saw the word written, however, she began to hear it, and now will use it if she is asked to. The word ‘equals’, however, which functions as a restricted form of ‘is’, she learned with ease and uses freely, volunteering such relatively recondite statements as ‘seven plus five equals twelve’. She has much more difficulty with ‘seven and five are twelve’, although ‘equals’ and ‘plus’ come from a set of words proper to age six while ‘is’, like ‘and’, should appear much earlier. The meaning of ‘equals’ is absolute and clear, however, not dependent on the multitudinous shifts of situations.

  It is not surprising, then, that Elly made do for years without the verbs that cluster around the ideas of affection, desire, and need. The words ‘I wanna’ characterize the small child, but this child who at two wanted nothing was six before she spoke the word ‘want’ — of course without the ‘I’. In those long intervening years, her desires, never numerous, were conveyed, first by gesture, then — in the expansion of speech at age five — by naming what she wanted. That she should be able to ask for some-thing in words seemed great progress; we hoped — I think we expected — that the realization that language was power would bring with it further appreciation of the joys of communication. And it is true that now, nearing nine, she has a new flexibility in requests; at a single recent mealtime she used four different patterns, not only the primitive ‘Peanut butter?’ but also ‘Eh’ [Elly] ha’ vanilla yogurt?’ — ‘Nee[d] egg?’ — and ‘Wan’ pie?’ If words fail to communicate, as with her indistinctness they often do, she will occasionally, if asked, pronounce them better; more likely, she will do as she did at two and a half — lead you to the wanted object, or make your hand approach it. Certainly there is progress here — but the reader who reflects how many ways there are to ask for something, and how often children make use of them, will realize how far there is to go.