Is this "normal"?

H

HaoZi

Guest
English grammar is very different from most languages, or so I've been told. His early exposure to Arabic would have left an impression on him as well, especially in cadence I think. Being four, he sounds like most 4-6 yro's I've heard talk. When Kiddo was a wee babe (i.e. in the babble stage) her father used to watch martial arts movies in the original language with the subtitles all the time (like marathons of the same movies repeatedly, shoot me please!). I swear she babbled in Mandarin, it certainly sounded like it (based on cadence, length of sounds and time between pauses, etc.) She still shoots out sentences like that now at times, though she's never spoken anything but English and a few Russian phrases we learned from podcasts.

The thing with female vs male pronoun sounds pretty normal for his age, too, and since he's a he, it's natural for him to lean on the masculine pronouns. Girls tend to refer to a lot of things with female pronouns for a while, too.
 

Malika

Well-Known Member
Yes, you might be right about his English having Arabic intonation. Poor kid - his English is Arabic, his French is English and his Arabic is... well, not very much :)
 

Marguerite

Active Member
Malika, that sounds pretty good, really. And you know where I'm coming from on the possibility of spectrum needing to be considered, yet I still want to reassure you. He really does sound to me like a kid who is trying to speak English but with a significant French influence. The thing is, the combinations he is using are working (ie you are understanding him0 so from his point of view, there isn't any problem.

The gender thing - I'd forgotten about adjective endings, that was very clever of you. Another thing to consider - use this as an opportunity to help him learn differences between male and female in other ways (something difficult child 3 had problems with for a long time, still sometimes has problems - I'll explain later). For example, "bull" and "cow". "Boar" and "sow". And so on. Go searching for examples together, including obscure ones (which can be fun). You're enough of a wordsmith, I think you can enjoy extending him here.

With writing - it doesn't matter if they're not teaching it yet. It demonstrates that the words have symbols to represent them and tat the symbols look different. When he does start to read, it will help him to have been exposed to this.

With difficult child 3 and gender - I think his difficulty with this was part of the egocentricity of autism. And that egocentricity is a defence mechanism, they can't relate easily to other people so they relate things back to themselves, their own frame of reference. All kids do this, but then move towards more empathy as they can understand it. Autistic kids take longer because they need to learn empathy in different ways. And we all know adults who do not have the 'excuse' of autism, who lack empathy! But difficult child 3 and gender - he had his own ideas on how to distinguish between male and female. To begin with he would often get his personal pronouns muddled. Very occasionally he will get it wrong, but self-corrects. For example, he might refer to his sister as "he". He had trouble when meeting other kids who did not fit the classic male-female stereotype in appearance. part of this could well relate to his partial face blindness (also can be part of autism). He's not bad with facial recognition, he's brilliant with voice recognition (odd, given how highly visual he is). But any face out of context, he really struggles with. For example, we live half an hour's drive from a large shopping centre (mall). It's one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere (depending on which country or city has built a new one lately). We often meet up with friends from the village, including people from our church where he has attended with us since infancy (although not for a few years - we don't make him come with us). These are people he will happily greet in the street in the village and will converse with at church. But I often offer these people a lift home (it saves a long train/boat trip with groceries) and often difficult child 3 would chat to them in the car as if they were strangers. "We live in [names village]. Where do you live? I have two sisters. Do you have any children?" And these are people, when he sees them in context, for whom he knows all this. But out of context away from the village, he just does not recognise people.
A friend of ours (a bit of a hippy) never cut her boys' hair. They are beautiful children, blonde and blue-eyed. Nice kids. And amazingly tough given the inevitable bullying as you would expect. These boys are good friends of ours, spend a lot of time with difficult child 3. difficult child 1 used to babysit them regularly, they adore him. But they're all boy - rough and tumble, jeans and t-shirts. With long blonde curls, although generally tied back or braided. difficult child 3 knows them by name (asexual names), he plays with them, but keeps referring to them as "she". I keep correcting. I think he's finally got the idea, but he would for years keep saying, "How can they be boys? They have long hair! They're pretty, like girls."
Then a young female friend cut her hair short, like a Joan of Arc cap. difficult child 3 knew she was a girl, but now she looked like a boy. It confused him, but less so because in his mind, her female identity had previously been established. And s her hair grew out a little, it was styled in a more feminine way.
Women we know of "butch" appearance, difficult child 3 often mistakes for male even if they're obviously female to other people. It can be embarrassing, especially if the woman in question is a closet lesbian who is not yet aware of it herself (and aggressively fighting every reference). I've learned to keep difficult child 3 away from these people. It saves angst.

difficult child 3 understands about sexuality and homosexuality. I had to explain it to him when the local kids called him bad words associated with allegations of homosexuality (the site censor does not like the words). difficult child 3 is accepting of sexuality differences but we're fairly certain he's straight. HE's fairly certain he's straight! He now does not get insulted, however, by being accused of being homosexual. He just shrugs and says, "How would you know? What's it to you what I am? Get a life!"

All this discussion began because I want to make it clear, when teaching gender in French, you may need to deal with the whole topic of gender in English too. I know it's different in French but there are connections. I remember learning French gender at a time when I was still struggling with learning the differences between male and female (I had access to an older sister's French reader, and I read everything. This was like a puzzle for me and I had to learn to read it, even though I was only four years old). Which now reminds me how I understood gender at that age - very similar to difficult child 3 now. Mostly understanding, but sometimes thrown by visual ambiguity. And NEEDING to be able to determine who was what, because a child's mind at that age (and I suspect mine especially) needs to be able to label and categorise.

One last 'lesson' from me - there is a huge gulf between speech, and language. The boy I described before who had brain damage - he had been bilingual. He lost one of his languages, but quickly got it back (as determined by his response to instructions). I remember this boy reading (ie identifying what text said) when he was 5 years old. So intellectually he was unimpaired. But he had no speech any more. He used to have speech, but not after the accident. But he does have language, because he can now type his words into a computer, Stephen Hawking style.

difficult child 3, by contrast, had speech, but not language. He was echolalic. He would listen to songs on the radio and reproduce those songs word for word (including occasional distinctive incidental accompaniment). But there was a 'blurred' sound to the words and if I used any of those words when I spoke to him, he showed no understanding. His language delay began to ease as he learned to read (thankfully, he was precocious). He did not even recognise his own name until he was 18 months old. He learned to read his name, and then he realised it was him. I put his name under his picture, and wrote "mummy" under my picture. That helped him get it. Not just his name, but the concept of labels. Yet all the time, he would be verbalising. Chattering in nonsense phonemes. easy child 2/difficult child 2 (8 at the time) called it "talking in scribble". It was all helping his vocal chords learn the skills they would need for when he did begin to use language, rather than speech.

Kids can chatter a lot, and younger kids who have a NEED to 'tell' you whatever, or feel they are part of the conversation, will often use jargon speech (aka "talking in scribble") to fill in pauses. As adults we do it with "um' and "ah" to fill in, to maintain a verbal flow. Kids do it more, and inexpertly, and a certain amount of this at various young ages is normal. Odd word order is also normal, especially in kids who are getting multiple inputs form different language sources.

IF your lad is anywhere on the autism spectrum, it would be very high-functioning and I do not think there is, in reality, much if anything in terms of measurable language delay. It is HISTORY of language delay that is diagnostic anyway (for autism, not Asperger's) and certainly in difficult child 3's case now, his language now scores in the superior range in most aspects. A cursory speech therapy examination would say he has absolutely no problem; but in fact he does have issues related to the history of language delay - all related to word retrieval. He's slower to mentally process expressive language (no problem with receptive) and has some speech dysfluency, but less and less of that, I've noted.

Last night I finally let him start his own FaceBook page. One of the first things he has done, is start a Scrabble game with me. And I'm good at Scrabble, but can give him no quarter. He has a superior vocabulary and generally knows not only the correct use of the words, but their etymology. He was using a dictionary at a high level from about 7 years old. Not just to look up the meaning of a word, but to identify its pronunciation (from the phonetics) and any other pertinent references in the dictionary.

So if your lad is talking nineteen to the dozen, take more note of what he talks about and how easily he can follow your side of the conversation. Remember he is only four, but the small amount you just shared with us sounds typical to me.

I remember a classmate at school when I was in Kindergarten, who had the speech therapist visiting the school to help teach her how to pronounce some sounds correctly. The girl would say, for example, "lellow" for "yellow" and I remember the therapist teaching her to move sounds back in her mouth. All the problem sounds that she could not say correctly, were form the back of the pharynx. We understood her because we mentally translated what she said most of the time. I found listening to the therapist helped me understand the girl's speech better, but she did begin to improve well with therapy. I wonder now if she had a hearing problem at the time. No doubt my speech pathologist friend will have a theory for me.

Don't worry too much, Malika. It is a challenge to raise a multi-lingual child, but you are a long way down that road now. At this age there are differences, but the brain is an amazing thing, a child's brain especially so. This is a wonderful thing you are doing for him.

Marg
 

Malika

Well-Known Member
Hi Marguerite. Thanks again for your thoughts. I don't think Jacob has any inherent problem with the concepts of male and female - he seemed to grasp that when very young! One of the problems may be - just thinking aloud - that he, typical of ADHD, does everything too quickly. He seems very bright, and he is, but I see that there is a real problem with attention to detail unless you stop and slow him down and go over things. I suspect he may have acquired French in the same way, in a bit of a rush, with no one slowing down and explaining basic concepts such as masculine and feminine nouns to him - and of course they didn't do it because he was only 3 when we came to France. As I said, though, the level of his language does not concern me but rather the fact that it does not develop - he is very quick to take on any new word that I introduce, and always asks "what is that?" if I say a word he doesn't know, but his mistakes just remain ingrained. And I was wondering whether that could reflect some kind of learning problem.
But really I don't know what's happening with J in so many ways. The next year or two will be very determinant (as his teacher says!) in revealing things. How will he take to reading and writing? What one feels with him is that he has this potential always, so I really don't know how it will go. I was worried about his writing being so huge and sprawling but the other day he was writing his name all over the place in joined-up letters and it was really very good - quite well-formed, regular letters...
A child is, by its nature, not a closed book or a finished product. Things are not set in stone. We will see, we will see :)
 
H

HaoZi

Guest
What language does he think in? What does use when you overhear him talking to himself when he's playing alone? Just curious.
 

Malika

Well-Known Member
Don't know what language he thinks in - I could try asking but getting the concept across and the answer might be a bit of a challenge :) - but he usually plays by himself in French. Sometimes in English though.
 

Marguerite

Active Member
I remember when studying French and German at school fairly intensively, I sometimes found myself thinking in one or other language. I edited a book of French-English poetry a few years ago. There was a separate editor for the French component but I was still picking up errors even though my French is not fluent. I found myself thinking in French then, too. And there have been times when I dreamt in those languages.

if you know more than one language, you often switch according to usage. Some people I worked with who were from various different countries in Eastern Europe used to specifically choose to swear in Yugoslav. They said it was the most satisfying language for the task!

Malika, he sounds fine. Time will tell. You could well be correct, that it is an attention thing.

Marg
 
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