My grand daughter Rachel was married to a young man with
rather severe palsy. One night at dinner he was recalling a school incident
from when he was five years old. He remembers being presented a page with lines
of letters. As he put it the letters jumped out at him and instead of naming
the letters he responded with the names of school friends.
He could already read- make sense of print. This at a time when
he had great trouble being understood in speech. I recalled some popular
magazine story years ago about a disease called hyperlexia. Speech therapists discovered
young patients reading all the waiting room magazines while waiting for therapy.
I remember thinking that’s pretty predictable – kids turning to reading when
speech is less accessible.
As we talked I had an amazing insight.
Here is a five year old with palsy whose head jerks around .
How does he learn to make sense of print if he can’t control involuntary
movements of his head and eyes? Since he did learn to read, we have to assume
that he was able to get sufficient input from the eyes to make sense of the
print . He had to do so in spite of the jerky movements of head and eyes
.
So that means his cortex could get the input it needed from
these uncontrolled eye movements. That’s
pretty remarkable but it shows how much the brain can perceive from jumbled
visual input.
So now put yourself in this then five year old head. He doesn’t
perceive lines of letters. He sees print to make sense of. What he describes as
the letters jumping out at him is patterns that his cortex is trying to make
sense of. So he perceives bits of names not names of letters.
Put this now into a broader context. His family were post World
War II Russian immigrants to Canada and then to the US. From birth on, he is
desperate to connect with those around him but loud, garbled boisterous speech
leads to violent fits of frustration which puts off those who he needs to
connect with and often leads to punishment and constraint. Eventually he learns
both Russian and English. And he learns to read. But it is some time before
anyone appreciates any of this.
His competence goes unrecognized.
I see two lessons in this:
1.The mind is even more flexible than I thought in its ability
to tolerate ambiguity and variation in language.
2. The universal ability of humans to invent and use
language in a community of language users is also much stronger than I had
previously believed.
