LANGUAGE MATTERS 2. “In the Beginning was the Word”

TREVOR STEVENS, Lecturer in Mental Handicap Havering Tec hnica I College, Romford, Essex

“In the Beginning was the Word”, and the word was da . . . or perhaps it was ma . . . or even ba. Anyway, it sounded like the baby’s first word.

Quite a remarkable fact really that, although it took man many thousands of years to acquire language, the average child manages the essentials in a matter of some 2-3 years. Even if we are looking for more than just the essentials, by the age of seven most normal children have learnt the full structure of adult speech production and only add to it in content (that is, more vocabulary). Unlike reading, the child does not receive any instruction and we do not even say to him, “Speak ! ”; we just speak. Is the process the same for the mentally handicapped child?

Baumeister (1968) would suggest that, if we are interested in the behaviour of subnormals (his term), we should study the behaviour of subnormals and that the study of normal behaviour “is quite irrelevant to this purpose”. However, since language acquisition depends to a large extent on socialisation, we should at least give the mentally handicapped child the benefit of learning in the same arena and, in the absence of much evidence to the contrary, expect that he might learn language in the same way, albeit at a slower rate.

How does it all start ‘‘in the beginning”? By the time we are old enough to ask this question, our speech has become such a natural part of communi- cation that it is difficult to separate it out and look back at it. If, instead, we observe other children learning how to speak, the process happens so quickly, almost spontaneously, that examining it is still easier said than done. But let us try.

Learning if pressed Some think that a child learns his first words from

his mother - that he imitates things that she says. This would probably be true if she concentrated on saying pa-pa, da-da, or ma-ma, but she doesn’t. Instead, she tends to speak in long sentences that he is unlikely to understand and it is the child himself who comes out with da-da.

Have you ever thought how similar the words for “Mum” and “Dad” are in different languages? “Ma- ma” and “Papa” are common to French, Italian, English and many other languages. Even in the more exotic Hebrew, “Daddy” comes out as “Abba”. Is this because all languages have basic similarities? Maybe, but it is also because these are the sounds that the child can produce most easily - all made by opening the lips. So, in a sense, the child begins first to speak and then his murmurings are interpreted as the sounds that new parents most want to hear - their own names.

It may be that mother does not teach her baby English, but that baby teaches mother “Babyish” - his own baby-talk.

Speaking with zest Is there a critical period for language to develop?

Children are born with the ability to make all the different sounds of all the different languages and these sounds can be heard in their early babblings (Brown, 1973). What appears to happen is that they give up making sounds which are not used in their native lan- guage and continue to make the sounds that they commonly hear around them. Children create their own language and then modify it so that others around them can understand their messages.

If language were all imitated, speech would be stereotyped and predictable but, as it is, most speech is entirely novel and has never been heard in that form before. It is this ability in the child to create new sentences that leads to him saying, “Look, I drawed two sheeps!”, a sentence that he is most unlikely to have imitated, especially if he does not have any brothers or sisters.

It would seem, then, that if language is something new that comes out of the child, language facility must be something with which a child is born - that is pre-programmed in his brain and is activated when he hears speech around him (Chomsky, 1968). This would at least explain why, for the normal child, language is acquired so quickly. What we do not know, however, is whether the mentally handicapped child is born with the same language aptitude.

Perhaps, as Bloom (1970) points out, children learn to talk because they have something to say and, as we shall see in the next article, mistakes in what the Reverend Spooner calls “peach seduction” often indicate that development is taking place.

According to Orwell (1951), all children are born equal but, linguistically speaking, it would appear that some may be born less equal than others. If LANGUAGE MATTERS as it should, then we must provide the mentally handicapped child with an inten- sive language training programme, beginning in the first few months of life, to ensure that he does not remain backWORD. References Baumeister, A. A. Paired-associate learning by institutionalised

and non-institutionalised retardates and normal children. Am. J . Ment. Defic., 1968; 73: 102.

Bloom, L. Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1970.

Brown, R. A first language: the early stages. London: Allen and Unwin, 1973.

Chomsky, N. Language and mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.

Orwell, G. Animal farm. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1951.

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