I actually sent this to Stanley (and then told him not to post it because blah blah kids) before there was talk of bilingualism and Ev Psych Just So Stories and parental medical decisions, but it fits now.

I'm not looking for a diagnosis or medical advice, just anything people here might know or think about based on what's here. Mara's younger brother and older sister, being raised by different people, both also have needed speech therapy. She'll be getting an evaluation soon for her pica/oral fixation stuff and I think probably some of the speech background will come into it, but I don't think she needs speech therapy anymore, which is why I'm more open to thinking about it in a more abstract way.

My take is that essentially she's learned spoken English as a foreign language rather than a primary language, and her "first" language is totally internal or nothing. So she'd make the same kind of mistakes I made in high school French, learning "upstairs" and "downstairs" as a matched pair and then not always being able to know which word was which.

This sounds dead on -- I wouldn't have come up with it myself, but that she has problems with words that come in sets that she learned in a bunch rather than organically. Pronouns and prepositions both fit that pattern. How is she on time? Yesterday, tomorrow, ten to three, ten past three? It seems like it might be similar.

2: I think you're right about time being a problem. If she signs the words for meals as she says them, which includes the sun position, she knows which meal she's talking about, but otherwise she'll say "Is this dinner?" at breakfast and I don't know whether she's being deliberatly ridiculous or genuinely doesn't know. "Morning"/"sunrise" and "evening"/"sunset" are also hard to distinguish, though "night" and "day are not.

She knows her days better than Nia at 6 does, perhaps because at 3 Lee taught her to count them on her fingers with sort of a mnemonic. Both of them know 5 minutes is too long to wait for ice cream and "in an hour" means they'll just have to keep asking, but can't tell time in any more meaningful way. She rarely messes up "yesterday" and "tomorrow," but it has happened and I think is part of the normal child problem of not knowing how to talk about the past or the future. (My littlest brother used "laster/day" and "laster/night" to mark the past plus time of day.)

The she/he stuff doesn't sound different at all from what my kid did, so I'm wondering if this might be just a part of learning to speak and not an issue at all. I definitely had to do a fair amount of "not he, she" and that kind of thing. She's kind of grown out of it now. Prepositions are also hard and unnatural and while I haven't noticed it recently we're probably not close to 100% correct usage there either.

And we had literally exactly the same dinner/breakfast thing going on until very recently. How old is Mara? 4 1/2?

5: She'll be 5 at Halloween, so a bit beyond that. She's the only kid in her class who can't do she/he at this point, but whatevs. She's gotten a lot better about it since Nia's been here.

That she can't follow instructions about her body is more interesting to me, but it's possible that's not language related and is some sort of sensory processing thing or some shit. Who knows?

That she can follow instructions otherwise is interesting to me. Let me know how you get that to work.

7: I'm going to go away after this and get lunch, but other instructions are generally met with "Never! Never ever!" these days. She'll generally do what she has to eventually, though. She's such a great kid, even if she is trying to train herself to be a supervillain.

All the best children are training to be supervillains these days. Or, at least, mine certainly are.

She's such a great kid, even if she is trying to train herself to be a supervillain.

Solution: teach her "I did it 35 minutes ago."

She's exactly my kid's age. It sounds to me more like that she's just a little (but not very significantly) late developing on an ordinary speech development trajectory, not that any anything unusual is going on, and that the late development is just due to a somewhat (but not that significantly) later starting point of getting verbal in the first place.

I think the "no first language" doesn't fit with what is known about language acquisition. What I've read says that you can have perfectly normal first language acquisition up until puberty. People with more of a cog-sci/linguistics background, like e. messily or s. tweety, can correct me though.

The problems with pronouns and prepositions seem to me to be a common pattern of delay, unrelated to anything particular in her circumstances. Joey has some mild speech problems, and those are both areas where he made mistakes. He still screws up he and she sometimes. I was more worried about the spatial prepositions and related terms. He didn't swap upstairs/and downstairs, but he did swap front yard and back yard and also, yesterday and tomorrow. Both I and my late maternal grandmother have some kind of undiagnosed spatial problem which I thought he might have inherited. But really these are just parts of language that come later, so people with language delays get them later.

10 is awesome.

13: indeed.

"Mara, have you tidied your room?"

"Oh, please, Thorn. Do you think I'm some sort of Republic Comics villain? I did it 35 minutes ago."

My mum still gets spatial prepositions mixed up, so I wouldn't worry abou that too much.

you can have perfectly normal first language acquisition up until puberty

A lot of the current consensus on language acquisition and language learning is "we don't really know". There are so many complicating factors, including abuse, neglect, sensory integration issues, but also just tons of individual variation in humans, that any patterns or expectations should be taken with several spoonsful of salt.

But "up until puberty" is much later than my understanding of what consensus there is. I generally see people talking about 4-7 as the upper limit for first exposure resulting in normal acquisition. (not that you can't eventually become a fluent user with later exposure, but the acquisition process doesn't follow "normal" stages). (I may be using some of these words in a more precise way than you meant).

Anyway IANASP but nothing in the OP sounds especially concerning to me, especially given a somewhat delayed start. If all the other kids* mix their pronouns up until 3 or 4, and M does it until 4 or 5, that seems well within the predicted range of variation even without the delayed exposure early on.

*"All the other kids" don't actually do anything on exactly the same schedule, obviously.

All the other kids with their hers and his...

Say Cleveland rocks?

is "linguistic deprivation" a technical term these days?

I was struck by your use, because I just read an article by William Labov from the early 70s where he argues that the idea of "verbal deprivation", as a description of inner-city black kids' relation to language, is basically a pseudoscientific/racist refusal to acknowledge cultural difference and the validity of AAVE--and I'd never heard the term "verbal deprivation", so I figured the Labov position won the day. OTOH, Labov did seem a little too invested in taking shots against educational psychology...

anyway, absolutely not being hostile here, just genuinely curious.

I figured the Labov position won the day

I had thought that current thinking was that there was a substantial class difference in how much verbal interaction was addressed at babies and children, and that this had a substantial academic effect. Isn't that the whole Harlem Children's Zone thing -- parenting classes and early childhood education to minimize that difference?

But anyway, while I don't know Mara's history with any specificity, she was adopted by Thorn and her partner out of foster care, presumably due to problems in her home environment. She may have been in an environment that wasn't in the ordinary range of variation of parenting practices, but was really unusually non-interactive.

Let's see, I think halford is right that what she's doing is normal, helpy-chalk is right that these are probably normal problem areas for kids with speech problems, and E. Messily right that kids come back fine from much more profound delays. I have a friend whose deaf daughter had absolutely no language or sign input at her first foster home in her first twoish years and now at about Mara's age can sign like her agemates and speak well.

I'm really not worried about any of this, just curious. Probably the biggest variable is that I'm not someone who can see pictures when I close my eyes, and so probably I imagine that a life without language or self-narration must be a sad and lonely one. Mara obviously understood words and knew what she wanted, so now when I'm honest about our first weeks together I admit that she probably could say 20-30 words when she turned 3, but if I repeated back to her what I thought she might be grunting about, she'd give me yes or no. And she had very expressive eyes and facial expressions that conveyed a lot. Maybe I was a good fit for her because I am so verbal and verbose and talked her through what she wanted and narrating our whole lives, which is now her job.

jim.lurk, I probably used the term because I had the phrase in the back of my head but wasn't trying to draw on that usage. Apparently there's a (non-racist) kind of speech delay that's common to neglected kids who are getting a lack of stimulus in general but specifically not being spoken to or interacted with verbally, and this matches some of what we know about Mara's early years. That's different from the theory that poor kids only hear however many words a day while middle-class kids hear thousands and thousands more, both of which are different from the theory that kids who are raised speaking AAVE may not respond well to teachers using standard English because they speak basically to make sure their point is clear.

Our current big linguistic push, which I've mentioned before, is helping Nia learn to conjugate verbs in the traditional without making her think that there's anything wrong with her grandma saying "Is you coming over this weekend?" I spend time in the car with the girls running "I am / you are / he is / we are / they are" and "She likes Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber likes her. She is glad she is friends with him. He likes to sing to her." Nia is jealous that Mara can already manage verbs, so we are focusing more on the pronouns because it reminds her that Mara has trouble with things she can do.

12 combined with 16.last fits with my reading on the topic.* Normal up until around 6 or 7. Certainly much later than Mara's age when she came to live with you. I'd go with within the normal range of development with possible delays due to relative lack of exposure when young. FWIW, there are cultural groups in which kids don't get spoken to much when small. Long term I don't think it makes a huge difference.

* I studied child language acquisition at university, but it was nearly 20 years ago, so I'm not going to pretend any expertise on the topic.

'Cultural groups' in previous comment not code for African-American or anything, btw. I mean there are [non-Western] groups who've been studied by linguists interested in language acquisition where children aren't addressed much directly until older.*

* although it wouldn't surprise me if the differences are exaggerated in the usual way.

20: Yes, I'd be interested in this too. I have certainly encountered young people whose parents spoke to them far, far less than other children, and I know there's a lot of research on class differences in number-and-kind-of-words-spoken from parent to child, but I don't know if that qualifies as "linguistic deprivation."

To be clearer on Mara, pretty much all the non-language-related things she struggles with are pretty clearly a result of having been left alone too much when she was a baby. Although I like her parents as people, I don't disagree with the courts that she was being neglected medically and otherwise. It was not the stereotyped poor-people-in-close-quarters problems of the parents not speaking to the kids enough or the parents speaking to the kids as peers (which Nia's situation seems to have been) and the resulting language idiosyncrasies that arise from those.

And I am conflicted in so many ways about pushing the gendered pronouns and wonder if I'd be more loosegoosey about it if she were named Storm or I didn't have a tiny worry people would think she's being deprived of awareness of gender because she's in a gay home. But then I remember that she's started mimicking me and saying "Batman is for boys AND girls" and I figure I'm doing what I should.

A lot of the current consensus on language acquisition and language learning is "we don't really know". There are so many complicating factors, including abuse, neglect, sensory integration issues, but also just tons of individual variation in humans, that any patterns or expectations should be taken with several spoonsful of salt.

But "up until puberty" is much later than my understanding of what consensus there is.

This (unsurprisingly) is exactly my understanding of the current thinking on these matters. And yeah, I'm not a bit a speech pathologist, nor a language acquisition expert, but the things Thorn's citing sound like pretty standard L1 (first language) acquisition phenomena, just happening on the somewhat later side of things.

My nephew had speech delays (but not language delays) and while they frustrated him, they also made him extremely expressive. He acted stuff out a lot and can still do impressions. His speech (now clear and fluid, thanks to speech therapy) is very animated.

We wouldn't have chosen for him to struggle like that, but his work-arounds left him with some nice abilities.

I've seen the gendered pronouns confusion thing in kids from a wide variety of backgrounds too. I think my friend's kid, who just started kindergarten, was still confusing them as recently as last spring, although he's a princess boy, and his mother is queer, and trans, and his sister is extraordinarily precocious, since she's pretty much the oldest kid in her parents' peer groups. So, you know, free to be, you and me and all that.

One of my brothers had literally no language until a year and a half (was deaf at the time and living in an orphanage with no one who signed). He never did learn to read fluently, but he speaks natively. My recollection (or rather, my recollection of my parents recollection) is that he actually caught up language-wise relatively quickly. Or at least, that language development caught up faster than emotional development.

(Well there was a bit of a hiccup for a few months when he started hearing after a few months and decided he'd rather just say "ahhh" instead of signing, but that's not really relevant to the current topic.)

Thanks, rfts. I'm appreciating all the various stories people have. I guess it's not a surprise that this is a thread geared toward things I like (a mix non-pushy anecdotes and people who actually know things but aren't overstating their credentials or anything) but it's really been pleasant for me.

UPetgi: The training Lee and I had to attend last night made us parents categorize kids' developmental age according to Physical, Social, Linguistic, Emotional, and one other category I can't remember and we're supposed to keep all that in mind when coming up with discipline strategies. I think your brother's experience of language and emotion being significantly out of step is pretty typical (and Mara's skews in the other direction, that she's unusually insightful and empathetic for a little kid) and really makes sense. The brain is an amazing thing, and so is resilience.

My speciality is in language acquisition (though second language, not first), and I think E. Messily is pretty much right. Very little is known about this stuff for sure, and the big debate right now is whether or not there are critical periods for acquisition, and if so, how do they work. Your intuition about her first language being acquired as a second one is about as good as any expert could do, probably. She may never overcome whatever it is that's holding her back, but she may also eventually compensate for it with some other cognitive faculty, such that no one even notices.

What I've read says that you can have perfectly normal first language acquisition up until puberty.

I don't think this is right. Test cases are blessedly pretty rare, but someone who's deprived of language or meaningful linguistic interaction until say, age 8, will almost certainly have profound and permanent language disabilities.

In both Chinese and Japanese as they took their modernized forms, there seems to have been the idea going around that gender-neutral pronouns were bad - maybe primitive? I don't know what people were actually saying about it, but the results are visible now.

In Chinese the "he/she" word 他 ta was given a new character to write it with for the "she" meaning, 她 (switching in the "woman" radical for the "person" radical), but with no change in pronunciation; Chinese learning English still have trouble distinguishing "he" and "she". In Japanese they didn't have good grammatical equivalents for third-person pronouns in the first place, and designated an existing word for "that person" (I believe) kare as "he" and a less-common word for "that woman" kanojo as "she".

Another complicating factor with English pronouns is that esh and aitch are both relatively tricky sounds to articulate. So in some cases children can perceive and understand the difference between he and she without being able to consistently produce the correct forms.

(No idea if that's happening here, obviously)

Test cases are blessedly pretty rare, but someone who's deprived of language or meaningful linguistic interaction until say, age 8, will almost certainly have profound and permanent language disabilities.

Test cases are (sadly) not nearly as rare in the deaf community, and it's definitely true that there are noticeable, permanent effects. The difference between first exposure at 5 or 6 (when a kindergarten teacher or school nurse will probably identify hearing loss even if the parents didn't) and first exposure at 8 or 9 (which happens to kids in other countries, and American kids whose parent stick them in oral programs) is startling.

Solution: teach her "I did it 35 minutes ago."

Hawaii somehow hit upon the phrase "about forty minutes" and it sounds unbelievably mature and grown up when she says it, even though she obviously has no idea what length of time she's talking about. "Yeah, we were playing outside for about forty minutes..."

Mine keeps saying, "Two Words" and then uttering several hundred.

I taught my 2-year-old cousin to say "Cease and desist!" instead of "stop it" or "leave me alone". That was hilarious.

It didn't stick after he started preschool though 'cause those dumb other kids didn't understand him.

so I'm not going to pretend any expertise on the topic.

I guess we'll just go ahead and shut down the internet, then. Is that what you want? Is it really?

This is a timely topic for me--I've been spending more time with my godchildren since they moved to my general neck of the woods, and the (almost) four-year-old is quite speech-delayed.* His speech is unintelligible roughly 90% of the time (from his parents' perspective, not just mine), and while he does sign some, I have no idea whether he knows as many signs as is "typical."

*Most likely as a result of Neurofibromatosis.

I should read the thread in case someone has already said this but... it could be as simple as a difficulty translating words into physical action. Just from personal experience doing physical therapy for my knee(s), the PT could explain something very clearly, I would understand the words verbally just fine, but I often struggled for a few minutes before I could figure out how to make my limbs perform the actions described. I'm watching Rory at beginning ballet now and have a sense that she has a similar difficulty. It can be a matter of physical rather than verbal fluency.

41: Mara's physical control is better than the norm for her age group and she's an inspired dancer when she's doing it on her own, really able to express the feel of the music even when she's hearing it for the first time. (I'm not claiming to be an unbiased observer.) But "straighten your knees" seems to mean nothing to her. It's actually been a good thing since she seems to have more dance/musical talent than Nia, but Nia's the oldest in the class and looks really good because she can follow all the instructions, so neither quite feels left out.

I don't know how to describe it except that when I watched the gymnastics kids learn pike/straddle/tuck or the ballet class learning the French names for their moves, they all seemed to have the same trouble remembering that Mara did with the simple body movement descriptions given by the teachers. I think she doesn't do self-talk about her body but is just in it or something like that. Possibly that's normal and I'm weird, but it's one space where she's noticeably way behind kids who are two or even three years younger than she is. I'm working on subtle practice with it, but she's not very open to it because it's clearly hard for her and frustrating.

On the he/she thing, Mara can now make all the sounds she needs to speak English without difficulty, though she slurs her words at times and still uses less correct pronunciations for words she learned when she was very little (and "arachaeosaurus," which apparently looks like T. rex and is neither an archaeopteryx nor a brachiosaurus but she wants to talk about it all the time even though she made it up) and she'll use "he" and "she" interchangeably within the same sentence or group of sentences to refer to the same person. She's gotten much better in the last month and typically matches gender but not necessarily case.

It was originally my goal to have her essentially indistinguishable from other kids her age by the time she starts kindergarten in a year, at which point she'll have spent three years with us and three years before coming to us, which some adoptive parents find is a meaningful divider. Even with her quirks, she's already surpassed that bar probably a year ago. I think she'll do very well with wherever she goes in life, and so much of that is a credit to her. She was so desperate to be loved and have attention and to express herself, which made it really easy to help her experince that. Like Megan's nephew, she's expressive and gregarious in a way that draws people in. I am so proud of her and impressed by her, which I know is not news to anyone here.

To clarify (not that I think it's necessarily relevant), the ability to consistently produce correct sounds in context is often separate from the general physical ability to produce said sounds. So it would be normal for someone to make an H in one context but not (or sporadically) in others. Variability within normal acquisition is huge and wondrous.

I have some other opinions about how "signing" is getting thrown around as a potential intervention/remediation, but I don't want to be a huge brat so I'll wait til I'm asked to expand on that.

arachaeosaurus should have eight legs, eh? T-Rex is bad enough with four.

... she's an inspired dancer when she's doing it on her own, really able to express the feel of the music even when she's hearing it for the first time. [...] I think she doesn't do self-talk about her body but is just in it or something like that.

These sound like two views of one phenomenon.

I agree with what all the other linguists (and some non-linguists) have said about this.

42: So sort of like the part of her brain that processes the words and the part of her brain that moves her body aren't communicating well?

re: 43

Some adults struggle with following verbal instructions or even copying other people's movements. Teaching a martial art, as I do, which isn't that different from teaching dance, I'm continually amazed at the sheer range of people's abilities in this area.*

'Stand on your right leg, now bend your left knee and raise your left leg until the thigh is horizontal.'

[demonstrate]

Then stand agog, as person stands on left leg, then steps to the right and bends both legs into some sort of odd crouch.

'No, stand on one leg. The right one. No, the other side. No, don't hop up and down. Just stand still.'

etc

So again, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a child was different, in terms of ability, from another child or group of children. There's a wide range. Even if the person is otherwise very co-ordinated.

* I have a new-ish student at the moment that I sometimes think must be taking the piss they are so bad at following instruction. And yet, I know they are trying really hard.

Yeah, E. Messily, she's not actually using real ASL in any meaningful way and I don't want to suggest she is or should be. so I was trying to distinguish between having some "baby signs" as a way to let someone know whether she wanted milk or juice before she could say those words rather than just having her go to the fridge herself like her prior foster family did. She didn't have much mouth control then and drooled all the time, which was sort of a vicious circle thing where her muscles weren't strong because she didn't talk and she didn't talk because her muscles weren't strong and it was hard for her. But it's sort of silly for me to say that maybe we all should have taught her some easy signs rather than maybe we all (parents, three foster placements) should have worked harder to get her to talk, because that's not what happened and it really doesn't matter. I probably phrased pretty much everything I wrote pretty poorly, and I know I did with this.