The Siege

by Clara Clairborne Park

  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.

  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.

  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 u
nderstand 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’