In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [52]
But she wasn't sure what to do with the children who couldn't speak. “They had little boards with pictures on them—a picture of a toilet, a picture of some food, all needs-based pictures—I went through a year just asking them yes-or-no questions: ‘Would you like to do this? Would you like to do that?’ But they couldn't initiate anything themselves.” They seemed to understand what was said to them, and, more important, they seemed to have something to say. “You could just tell with the twinkle in their eye or something.”
McNaughton started talking with some of the staff about trying to introduce reading to these kids. She and Margrit Beesley, an occupational therapist, went to the administration to ask for a half day to work just with the nonspeaking kids. “The administration agreed, and we were given a laundry room in the basement to try our experiment.” First, they needed to figure out what the kids knew and what they understood. They decided to try making up symbols that the kids could point to in order to express themselves (most of the kids, unlike Ann, were able to point), but it took them a long time to figure out how to symbolize more abstract concepts, so they decided to see whether someone already had a system of symbols they could use.
Their search led them to Semantography, Charles Bliss's eight-hundred-page book. He claimed that with the small number of basic symbols in his book, thousands of ideas could be expressed through combination. For example, this was how the words for emotions were expressed:
A noun could be made into a verb with the addition of an “action” symbol:
And adjectives could be made with the addition of an “evaluation” symbol:
Other words were derived from more complex types of combination:
This type of combinatorial system seemed promising. The children could only point to what they could reach from a seated position in their wheelchairs; they couldn't have a separate symbol for every word they might want to say. But if they could put two symbols together to create a third word, they could get more out of what fit in front of them.
Once McNaughton had taught the kids the meaning of a few symbols and showed them examples of how the symbols could be put together, she witnessed an explosion of self-expression. Kids whose communicative worlds had been defined by the options of pointing to a picture of a toilet, or waiting for someone to ask the right question, started talking about a car trip with a father, a brother's new bicycle, a pet cat's habit of hiding under the bed. Kids who were assumed to be severely retarded showed remarkable ingenuity in getting their messages across. When one little boy was asked what he wanted to be for Halloween, he pointed to the symbols “creature,” “drink,” “blood,” “night”—he wanted to be Dracula. One particularly bright little girl named Kari took to this new means of expression with so much gusto that she could barely stand to be away from her symbols. When her father picked her up from school, she would cry through the whole car ride home, and could not be consoled until she was on the living room floor with her symbols, telling her family about the exciting events of the day.
McNaughton and the team of therapists she was working with took a picture of Kari, sitting in her wheelchair, surrounded by an array of symbols. Her eyes are sparkling, her smile is huge, and her dimples are adorable. When they finally tracked down Bliss in Australia, they sent him the picture. Before he received it, he later wrote, “I was resigned to my fate that I shall not see the fruits