Language

Little did I know all those years ago in my language acquisition class, that I was learning material that I would be later using to bring the gift of speech to my own little child. Yes, Ian and I were linguistics majors in college – the few, the proud, the unemployed. (Hey, it’s in the top ten unemployable degrees in the nation!) As much as I enjoyed it, I have many times thought that it was a worthless degree. I never have and probably never will obtain employment because of it.

But now I have a little boy who, in spite of his three years on this earth, has only a handful of words. His development level in speech is about the age of a 12-15 month year old. But this doesn’t mean that he is lacking intelligence in any way – in fact, we found that it was quite the opposite – he was a little sponge – quickly soaking up new situations, information, sounds, experiences, etc.

He babbles – it is quite adorable – it sounds like a little language all his own. Really, it is a baby’s way of working out sound combinations within a language. Can the “sss” come before the “k” and can a word have a consonant and then a vowel and then a consonant or is it consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel? Who knew babies were such analysts? Of course, this is all in Bulgarian, so he will have the additional challenge of figuring it out for English too.

His language delays are probably the result of several factors.

First, he is visually impaired. Children who have sight problems from birth generally speak at a little latter than sighted kids. This is because part of the information in the equation is missing… yes, they hear all the words, but do not see what the words are referring to. Even coming to understand that language has the purpose of communication comes a little later. It is hard to work out one-on-one associations and fine tune definitions. Mommy calls a little toy a “car” and the big thing he sits in to go places is called a “car” too. How do you reconcile that when you don’t see that both are the same shape, with different sizes, having the same features like wheels and mobility? You would have to understand the concept of a toy too… which he doesn’t. It takes extra effort and insight to teach a visually impaired child these things.

Secondly, all children need lots of input to learn language. They need to be constantly surrounded by language from birth to acquire language. In normal childhood, this isn’t a problem. They get goo’ed and ga’ed over, sung silly songs to and are in constant conversation with their primary care providers – Mom and Dad. In an orphanage – even a “good” one like the one our little boy is in – this is just not the case. Lots of kids need care and speech is limited to “Stop wiggling” when clothes are being put on and “Go to sleep!” when a child wakes everyone up in the middle of the night screaming. Without the raw material to analyze, babies just don’t figure it out. Acquiring language is a little like creating a library – a room full of shelves is not a library. Babies are filling their language “shelves” with books (language/speech data obtained from listening to the language around them). If fewer “books” are available to put on the “shelves”, then it is going to take longer for them to fill up – and this needs to happen before they can start talking and become little fluent native speakers of a language.

Thirdly, our little boy may have had some brain damage at birth. We think that this is highly unlikely – we did not see any symptoms of it when we visited him. But it is possible that some of the shelves of his “library” of a speech center in his brain have been damaged and the “books” of speech data are just falling off them. Unlikely, yes, but it is common that adopted children sometimes have unknown special needs that become apparent over time. If so, we will cross that bridge if we come to it. But once again, this is not evident from our observations of him – it’s just a remote possibility. And even then, there are things one can do to bring a child to his or her full potential with language.

So how does one help a little child with a speech delay?

First of all – call in the professionals! Speech therapists really know what they are doing and can make a world of difference! Our little boy will have a special speech therapist friend for sure!

But there are other things that we will be doing to help him learn and grow in language.

We will talk and talk and talk. We will talk to him, we will talk around him. This is the best thing. We want to be sure that he has as much speech data as possible to fill up those little shelves in his brain.

We will talk out life – as we do everything, we will describe what we are doing out loud. What he cannot see, we will describe. If the wind is blowing, we will say, “O how the wind does blow!” and if we are cooking pancakes we are going to be talking about how we measure, stir, and flip! And eat! Mmmm… pancakes!

We are going to read to him. Not only do books capture the interest of a child with stories, pictures, and rhyme, they provide repetitive language. If you read the “Hop on Pop” every day for a year, soon enough, you will find your child not only hopping on pop (poor Ian!) but talking about hopping on pop.

We will also be teaching non-language thinking skills like association and anticipation. In order to grasp language, you have to understand how things can and do correlate to one another and with language. If your teddy bear has eyes, nose, and mouth, and you have eyes, nose, and mouth and mom has eyes, nose, and mouth… you make a connection that all eyes, even fake ones on a teddy bear, are all the same thing and can be called by one word… and that if you see a dog for the first time ever, you can recognize that he has eyes too!

We are really looking forward to helping our little one grow in his language… maybe he will even grown up to be a language lover and linguist like us… we would be so proud! But then again, maybe we should steer him towards a more, well… profitable area of study. I bet he would make a great nuclear physicist! But first, I think we will work on those language skills…