The Use of Nonverbal Communication by a Slow Speech Developer

Abstract

The language development of an adopted Korean girl, Jennie, has been followed for the first 2 years and 7 months of her life. While Jennie is bright, her speech development is slow as compared to a number of other children. At the age of 2;4 Jennie had just acquired a 50-word vocabulary and was using only one-word sentences. Her early slowness in speech development is atttibuted to cultural trauma. Two other causes for slow speech development, namely, innate and environmental causes, are discussed briefly.

It is maintained here that Jennie's early speech development has not kept pace with her cognitive development. Evidence for this assumption includes: (1) her use of nonverbal means to make up for some of her lack in verbal skills, (2) her awareness of her difficulty with speech production and her apparent attempt to do something about it, (3) her use of lexical items that were produced for the first time much later than they were apparently learned, (4) her use of approximately the same functions of language that other children her age make use of, and (5) her unusually rapid expansion of both lexicon and syntax beginning at about the age of 2;5 and continuing to that of 2;7, which has served to bring her speech development much closer to that of the other children with whom she is being compared.