What Needs to Happen in the Child’s Mind for Speech to Develop?
Animals can communicate through sounds and gestures.
Humans can do that too, but only human beings can speak and use language.
Animals can communicate through sounds and gestures.
Humans can do that too, but only human beings can speak and use language.
We can train animals to perform a behaviour, but not to use language like humans, because human language is not just a learnt behaviour, but a communication about emotional/ mental states using symbols, representations and cultural meanings. Language was not ‘invented’, but evolved as an emergent property of the mind. One’s first language can’t be taught, but develops once basic mental properties have formed.
We can ‘train’ a child to repeat, but not to communicate in the sense of being able to talk about/ describe his/her own (emotional) experience, which requires the development of a deep ‘emotional grammar’ inside the child’s mind:
* through containment by mother/adult, which consists of the active integration
of observation, clarification and emotional resonance:
a) attention to the details of child’s (not adult’s) emotional experience (esp.anxiety)
b) clarification of this experience/ sorting one
thing from another/ helping child to differentiate
(especially inside vs. outside)/ to use his/her mind/ to
mentalise
* When the child/ baby has an emotional experience,
his/her mother/adult provides the word/ phrase which
binds this experience, contains and expresses the
meaning - provides a (mental) ‘container’ for it, which
the child can take in to remember as sound
containing the feeling and meaning
* In order to speak, the child’s mouth needs to be
liberated from the physical connection to the breast/ nipple
and its eating function to use for vocalising and making
sounds i.e. as a ‘gate-way’ for ‘in’ (= food) and ‘out’ (= sounds/ words).
* The child’s mind needs to generate images, memories, ideas, ‘dream-thoughts’, that
can be held in the mind and not ‘got rid of’ through movement, sensations, ... (e.g.
recognising a painting as the real landscape and as different from each other)
* To develop a mental apparatus for storing and transforming experience (esp.
anxieties and frustrations) into thinking and language (e.g. images, music, smells,
sensations, emotional atmosphere), i.e. memory and frustration-tolerance.
There are 2 kinds of memory:
a) computer fashion: facts, names, labelling things, lists
b) emotional events (can only be shared, not computerised)
* We all have an internal communication with ourselves all the time (e.g. children
often talk to themselves while playing) and everyone has an internal audience (e.g.
people who cannot talk in public), which develops into a musical ‘deep grammar’that
mainly contains feelings/ emotions.
* The transformation of images, memories and dream-thoughts into inner speech needs
to find a person in outside world who is paying attention: ‘live company’.
* Through wanting to communicate ideas linked to the ‘musical/emotional grammar’,
the child creates symbols in his/her mind, that represent the object (instead of
being equated with it), so that s/he no longer needs to possess/ have them, i.e. the
child learns a culturally specific vocabulary to describe the outside world.
Email: info@reachingautism.org
* through containment by mother/adult, which consists of the active integration
of observation, clarification and emotional resonance:
a) attention to the details of child’s (not adult’s) emotional experience (esp.anxiety)
b) clarification of this experience/ sorting one
thing from another/ helping child to differentiate
(especially inside vs. outside)/ to use his/her mind/ to
mentalise
* When the child/ baby has an emotional experience,
his/her mother/adult provides the word/ phrase which
binds this experience, contains and expresses the
meaning - provides a (mental) ‘container’ for it, which
the child can take in to remember as sound
containing the feeling and meaning
* In order to speak, the child’s mouth needs to be
liberated from the physical connection to the breast/ nipple
and its eating function to use for vocalising and making
sounds i.e. as a ‘gate-way’ for ‘in’ (= food) and ‘out’ (= sounds/ words).
* The child’s mind needs to generate images, memories, ideas, ‘dream-thoughts’, that
can be held in the mind and not ‘got rid of’ through movement, sensations, ... (e.g.
recognising a painting as the real landscape and as different from each other)
* To develop a mental apparatus for storing and transforming experience (esp.
anxieties and frustrations) into thinking and language (e.g. images, music, smells,
sensations, emotional atmosphere), i.e. memory and frustration-tolerance.
There are 2 kinds of memory:
a) computer fashion: facts, names, labelling things, lists
b) emotional events (can only be shared, not computerised)
* We all have an internal communication with ourselves all the time (e.g. children
often talk to themselves while playing) and everyone has an internal audience (e.g.
people who cannot talk in public), which develops into a musical ‘deep grammar’that
mainly contains feelings/ emotions.
* The transformation of images, memories and dream-thoughts into inner speech needs
to find a person in outside world who is paying attention: ‘live company’.
* Through wanting to communicate ideas linked to the ‘musical/emotional grammar’,
the child creates symbols in his/her mind, that represent the object (instead of
being equated with it), so that s/he no longer needs to possess/ have them, i.e. the
child learns a culturally specific vocabulary to describe the outside world.
Email: info@reachingautism.org