A Few Words, A Lotta Meaning

by Kristina Chew

category: Communication

Published May 01, 2009 @ 01:04AM PT

Thanks to everyone who commented on the post about saying disabilities or special needs. My own preference is "disabilities," which doesn't have to be a negative or pejorative term, as it might be thought. "Disabilities" (to us) simply states "what is" regarding Charlie, who's got some true challenges related to his neurology, as well as some remarkable abilities, many of which, it's felt by many, remain yet untapped. He's very much "differently abled."

Talking to Charlie's teacher yesterday, we paused over his reading programs and also efforts to teach him to read a calendar. These are all things that we've been working on teaching Charlie for years. Countless methods to teach Charlie to read have been tried, countless books have been read to him, Jim and I have stood him time and again in front of signs at train stations and storefronts and had him identify the letters. It's only been for the past few years that Charlie has been able to identify (most of the) the alphabet correctly. He still presses "P" on the computer when we say "B" and "V" for "Y." He's getting down how to tell time (with a digital clock) but the calendar---with its many words for months and days---has eluded Charlie.

It's not that he doesn't have a sense of time (Charlie's internal clock is set to the five-days-at-school, two-days-weekend sequence). And Charlie's an avid reader of all stimuli not involving words, especially when color and shape are notable. He still does best with photos; as shown at his hearing test last week, he's getting a lot better at recognizing objects in line drawings.

But back to words. Charlie is definitely (likes his two parents) a talker. I do say that he is "minimally verbal" as he uses a limited number of words at a time, and tends to speak in 2-4 word phrases. He definitely talks a lot (some of it's not 100% distinct); he does prefer to use his voice to express himself. (He's used to people around him doing that---like I said, he has two parents who are big talkers). (And fast talkers too.) Further, for Charlie, one word often means a lot more than it's generally used for.

Charlie's teacher noted to me that he's definitely learned to greet people with "hi" but just casually saying "bye" to announce that he is departing, is something he has yet to learn to do. In the course of discussing this, she and I both realized that, when Charlie says "bye," it never has a "casual" meaning like "see ya later" or "ciao" or "yassou." Charlie usally says "bye" when he wants us to, well, go away as he's had enough and we, pesky parents/teachers that we are, are overdoing it. In other words, "bye" has powerful connotations for Charlie: It's not a word he uses lightly.

I was reminded of how Charlie uses yes and no, and the absence (so far) of a word for gray areas and in-between feelings and states of being like "maybe" in his repertoire. Charlie often uses "yes" not only as "yes" but as a shorthand for "I want" or "that, please." "No" is definitely "no," but it's also more like "no not yet" or "not right now" or "I'm not sure I need to think about it more, let some time pass."

Bye, yes, no. Guess you could say that Charlie gets a lot of mileage out of monosyllabics---a straightforward statement about how many words (or rather how few) you really need to get your point across.