According to my mother, I didn’t speak a single word until I was 2 1/2 years old. Then, when I started speaking, I spoke in full and complete sentences.
Because I was a first child, I might very well have saved up my words until I could put a sentence together and converse properly with the adults. It’s also possible that I took to print more naturally than to speech, and so simply didn’t bother to speak for a while. I’ve always intuitively understood the purpose of the written word, and I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to read.
Ironically, when I entered the first grade, I was completely confused by the Dick and Jane books. We worked on them every day, and the teacher spent each session explaining, in excruciating detail, how to sound out every word. I couldn’t imagine why she had to explain anything so simple in such a tedious way. I secretly thought to myself how lucky I was to know how to read, because if I had to learn it in school, I’d be lost.
One day, the teacher asked me to read aloud a page of the book. In the picture above the text, the father was juggling. So, although I could see quite clearly that the words said “See Father play,” I read the text aloud as “See Father juggle.” The teacher told me to sound out the words and to stop guessing, but I wasn’t guessing. “Juggle” was the word I saw spelled out in my head, and it was the right word for the picture. The word in my mind was more real to me than the word on the page.
I have since discovered that whenever I think, speak, or listen to another person talk, I see word pictures. That is, I see every word spelled out across my mental screen. Needless to say, I have never had a problem with spelling. Once I see a word, I can remember it quite easily. What’s more, when taking college exams, I could leaf through my notes in my mind until I found the page with the correct answer.
The written word has always been my natural medium.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
*nods* I don’t think in word pictures, words don’t usually enter my thoughts at all. One of the reasons I can often tend to ramble in my writing (and why every time I post a blog entry I go over it twice to take out all of the repeated sentences) is that finding words for my thoughts is actually very difficult. It’s also the reason why my writing tends to be VERY descriptive… and I use a butt-ton of analogies.
Wish I saw the word pictures, ’cause I spell like crap for crap, lol. I grew up on the “sound it out” method… but so many words aren’t spelled the way they sound!
This, though, I completely identify with:
“According to my mother, I didn’t speak a single word until I was 2 1/2 years old. Then, when I started speaking, I spoke in full and complete sentences.”
That made my mother SOOOO mad. She loves baby talk. She was glad when my little brother was born and started speaking and spoke mostly in baby talk… until we found out that it was because he needed tubes in his ears and could barely hear, and was only repeating words the way he heard them. Once his ears drained and he could hear properly, he spoke in very articulate complete sentences. My poor mother never really got any “baby-talk” time out of any of us, LOL.
Ooo, neat. What few words there are in my head tend to be spoken.
I have the filmographic mental process that Temple Grandin describes… the pictures, with only an occasional spoken sound track. I do visualize the page information is on, though, and see the words then. If I can’t remember the page, it takes me a lot longer to come up with the info, if it happens at all. I do call up a picture of a word when I wonder about the spelling, but it’s not the usual course of things.
I also have to struggle with words to describe the picture I am seeing, which leads to severe frustration and crankiness when the person I’m talking to doesn’t get what I’m saying! I used to just repeat what I said LOUDER, but now I just softly growl as my mental gears slowly grind and try to figure out another way of saying something that the other person might understand.
So naturally, in the great way of life to give you what you need, my partner has significant cognitive impairments which we are still trying to figure out, but it often shows up as positional dyslexia (I just made that term up) which is to say… the front door is the front door most of the time, but then it switches and it’s the door that she’s closest to, but neither of us know that til she goes to the wrong door. %-\ I’ve told her to pull and had her walk towards me, asked her to close something only to have her open it wider… this is the source of most of our fights. We’re beginning to understand why… I have to think hard to figure out what to tell her in the first place, and then she does the opposite?! Aaargh. LOL
I am getting a lot of practice re-saying things.
Your history with language is uncannily like mine! I too didn’t speak, until I came out with complete sentences. My mother even bought the Dick & Jane readers so she could help me understand them. I grew to love them. In high school, I transferred from a public system to a high-level college prep yeshiva. We didn’t read real literature in my former school. The first book I had to read was Homer’s Odyssey in a prose translation. I was struggling, so my mother went back to reading aloud with me until I caught on. I fell in love with reading a second time, to the point where I earned a PhD and now teach English.
My language skills have always been poor, but then I’m deaf too.
My reading and writing though has generally been pretty good. In Kindergarten, I remember the teachers hassling me about reading individual letters. There was a picture book that we all used to fight for “Jack and the Beanstalk”. One day, after several weeks of planning, I managed to position myself and the book in close proximity so that when we were told to go and get a book, I could get it. I surprised myself by being able to read it. That day, I went from a non-reader to a reader.
I stayed reading picture books for a few years, even though many of the kids in my class were moving up. I read a few fairytale and myths collection books in the kids section of our library but other than that, I stayed with picture books.
Then my mother banned picture books.
As a result, I skipped all the remaining books in the children’s section of our library and started reading adult fiction. Starting once again with mythology, I moved onto other subjects and was reading Stephen King by age 11. By 13, I’d moved onto the more gruesome and explicit territory of James Herbert and Graham Masterton.
I did eventually go back and read some children’s books but by then, I was no longer in the correct age range.
i’ve always been thinking in word-pics and pictures. in fact, i remember quite clearly the day the elementary-school counsellor told me that it was unusual (it had been causing issues in math class), and we found a work around for me. it had never occurred to me (why would it?) that everybody didn’t do things that way.
one of the richer parts of being me
oh, and like many here, i was a voracious, prodigious reader from a very young age. i credited reading comic books for my hyperlexia until the AS diagnosis, now not so sure that was it.
Interesting.
You and I are similar in this — I remember things that I’ve seen the best — and also in our lack of other sorts of visualization. I recall you talking recently about being unable to mentally rotate objects; this is a deficit of mine that drives my hubby absolutely bonkers. His engineering mind just can’t fathom my verbal one.
I don’t see words to the extent you do, but I do see the written word in my head when asked how to spell a word….
Wow, this article sounds so very much like A lot of the stories Susanne tells me of her experiences. I, personally don’t much remember how quickly or well I started speaking, but I do know I started reading at a very early age. So much so, that I was constantly bored in kindergarten. By fifth grade and on, the teachers literally had no idea what to do with me, as I would frequently finish most assigned books before the other students had read the first chapter. I remember one high school English teacher just told me to read whatever I felt like and write reports on them, as I had already read all the books in that curriculum, years previously.
I know that It took me a lot longer to learn to write, however. I was always quite a bit behind. My spelling and punctuation were usually fine, I just took a very long time to decide what words to use. I also remember that I’ve always spoken slowly. I still do. I take a long time to formulate what to say and how to say it, often leading to very long pauses in conversations. I often tend to try to plan out the whole conversation in my head, beforehand. This sometimes leads to never saying anything out loud, because I forget that what was said in my head wasn’t actually verbalized.
That sounds almost exactly like me except I don’t have the word picture thing, I have the Temple Grandin type visual thinking. I have a hard time translating my thoughts into spoken language, Good luck trying to get me to give “off-the-cuff” directions about something, I can visualize it in my head but turning it into words can be very difficult unless I get time to think.
I started reading really early was was reading college-level stuff when I was 10, much to the delight of the school librarian.