I’m fascinated with theories of language acquisition, because one of my kids was mute due to autism. He talks now. He actually talks quite well. No accents. No modulation problems. No studders. His pragmatic speech needs work. Pragmatic speech is the ability to say the appropriate things at the right time and to talk about a wide range of topics. It’s closely related to social skills.
Yesterday, we waited in the lobby of the JCC for the shuttle bus that takes him to the daycamp location. An elderly woman slowly shuffled into the center. She leaned on her walker and made a couple of steps here and there. Ian shouted to her in cheerful voice, “Hey, Old Lady. Do you need some help?” Sweet, but not appropriate. On the plus side, he noticed things in the greater environment, he showed empathy, he attempted interaction, and he quickly accepted a correction from me that elderly people should not be addressed as “Old Lady.”
Ian has done much, much better than his peers who also had speech delays at that early age coupled with autism. In general, the prognosis for those kids are not good. Ian’s other issues are relatively mild and he has a high IQ, so that helped him out quite a bit. I also think that some things we did at home helped.
Slate has an article about an old PBS documentary about the evolution of speech. Here’s a clip of the movie.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
Apt. 11d 
I know the descriptions are in a SLP site, but they are hilarious, especially combined with the Australian idiomatic usage that has me occasionally not completely sure of the idiom (an example: a tell-tale, which I was first presuming was someone who liked to tell long-winded stories, but is in fact what we call a tattle-tale). I love idioms, especially from different cultures, and it’s intriguing to imagine what it would be like to listen to language without understanding what all of the phrases that litter our language mean.
I know plenty of boys who would hear the instruction “put the milk on the table” as a prelude to snarkily misinterpreting. In fact, in our house, we have learned to be highly specific when the snark level is high (for example, I instructed a family member this morning, to “straighten out, by being parallel to the north facing wall of our house” because I was pretty sure that “straightening” would have been willfully misinterpreted.
Language acquisition is fascinating. A fun study is the work of Deb Roy, at MIT, who got permission to start a study recording the language spoken in his home, nearly continuously on the birth of his son. The data has been slow coming, but there’s one report of his son’s language acquisition, to 24 months that shows some interesting results. For example, production of new words seems to peak at 20 months, and then fall (potential explanations: words are being learned, but have yet been produced at the 24 month end point — an artifact of measurement cutoff, or that children shift to multiword sentences, rather than new words during that period — or some combination of both).
Another interesting result is that caregivers adjust their use of the word in sentences right around the time that it is born — they decrease the complexity of their sentences until the word appears, and then start increasing the complexity again. Example: use “Mama’ naturally in speech until just around the time the child starts saying it, when caregivers start saying things like “Mama likes” and then, when the child says “Mama” then start using it naturally again. I find this second result fascinating because it emphasizes the interrelationship between caregivers/child in language acquisition.
a paper: http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/publications/Roy_interspeech_keynote.pdf
and his ted talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word (I haven’t seen)
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I believe that the sentence, “Hey, Old Lady, do you need some help?” would actually be fine if you said it in either Chinese or Russian. It’s fascinating how much of language (and inappropriateness) is cultural. Maybe you all just need to move . . .
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Will he ask “Excuse ma’am?” or something else in the future?
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Sorry for the delay, but this statement has hung in my head since I first read it: “I also think that some things we did at home helped.”
Of course it did. Just reading your blog as an outsider, it is clear that you put an enormous amount of effort into make sure that your son has the right services and environment. Being a parent is never easy and is even more challenging when tool available are often insufficient. So, there’s my $0.02 🙂
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