Word: speaking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flashes on the screen), a descending scale of cheerful beeps is heard. The trouble with Bambino's products is that while the gadgetry is brilliant, the games themselves are not very interesting. The problem is not restricted to Bambino; an observer suspects that in many cases (Microvision and Speak & Spell are notable exceptions), the engineers who made the toys have had more fun than will the kids who get them...
...commonly confused with a subcategory, "twin speech," a private collection of distorted words and idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb: "I out the pudatoo-ta" (I throw out the potato salad). Potato could be said...
Gracie and Ginny now attend separate severe language disorder classes in the San Diego public school system. Put in different schools so they will not fall back to their private communication, they speak jerky, passable English. But they are woefully behind in social and emotional development. "I keep reading that they are so normal now," says Catherine Pope, Ginny's instructor at Ross Elementary School. "It simply isn't true." Gracie can repeat a sentence "imbedded" with a clause and add numbers up to a total of five, sometimes higher. Both girls have motor-coordination problems...
...remembers the old language. "Yes," Ginny replies quickly. "No, you don't!" interrupts Tom Kennedy from the front-room couch. "I don't know why you are lying about that!" Ginny reaches playfully for Gracie's pen. "Keep-you-hands-off-me," laughs Gracie. Tom Kennedy speaks again. "You live in a society, you've got to speak the language," he says. "They don't want to be associated as dummies now." Ginny turns to her visitor after glancing conspiratorially at her parents. "O.K.," she says quickly, "I'11-talk-about...
...they succeed in suppressing her considerable intelligence. Early on, she saw Davis' book for what it became: Writes Davis, "I continued to work and she told her friends not to speak to me, as she feared the book would be a 'hatchet...