first words

[Deborah Gibson]

Thank you to everyone who responded, both to me directly and on this  
wonderful resource, to my question about the criteria for determining  
a child's 'real' words.   Two ideas particularly helpful to me  
resulted from this discussion. The first was that I consider my  
autistic son’s ‘real’ words to be those that meet the criteria of  
being consistent, meaningful, appropriate, communicative, extended to  
multiple exemplars, and relatively permanent, as conventional  
symbolic adult words are.  In my son’s case, few if any of his 87  
earlier productions before his word spurt meet these criteria,  
especially in form.

The second useful idea is to regard his earlier productions as having  
aspects of these criteria which are acquired at different times.   
I’ll  try to devise a taxonomy to analyse the development of these  
aspects over the word’s history, looking at the changes in his  
acquisition of understanding, form and meaning as a continuum, which,  
in the case of autistic children, may not always result in a  
conventional word with appropriate usage.

I agree with Bruno Estigarribia who wrote that if he hadn’t been a  
linguist he would have missed his son’s  first ‘word’ (I’m now  
hopelessly self-conscious about what to call this).  In my case,  
having a very language-delayed, actually language-averse, child, and  
being a starter linguist myself made me hyper-aware of any  
demonstration of receptive language and too eager to assign word  
status to any intentional gesture and vocalization, though our early  
communication with our son was dependent on our recognition and  
validation of all his idiosyncratic productions.



Deborah Gibson

Ph.D student

Dept of Language and Literacy

Faculty of Education

UBC

debgibson at telus.net


  
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