ABSTRACT
Language links different aspects of development together. Josie repeats her joke to anyone that will listen, watching for their response, hoping to make them laugh. Cognitively, she is yet unaware that the joke is a play on words; she has yet to learn the phonemes or phonics to realise the difference between ‘hole’ and ‘whole’ and how that relates to doughnuts. She does not yet grasp the structure of the joke and why it is funny. What she is clear about, though, is the social pleasure that repeatedly telling her joke gives her, and her further delight in the emotional delight she experiences when she makes someone else laugh. Without words, our emotional feelings have no name or expression, our cognitive understanding of concepts cannot be explained, justified or shared and our memories and narratives cannot be passed easily onto others. Doing such things are what makes us social, and language is at the heart of it. If I asked you to think about your favourite childhood day out, you would remember the descriptions of the place, people and experiences of it. You would maybe label the emotions that thinking about it evokes, and be able to associate the smells and sounds of the occasion. Whether you say it out loud or not, all your thinking is in words, as the voice in your head links together the cognitive, emotional and social connections that your memory associates with my request. Language links our cognitive and emotional being to our social being. I once worked with a practitioner who had never heard the spoken word, heard a song or a child laugh and, as someone who had been born deaf, she bought a new awareness to many of her colleagues and the children that she worked with. Her thinking was in symbols and shapes, as she would communicate in gesture, facial movements and formal sign language. Among the deaf community, not to stare at someone’s face when talking is rude and to touch, tap or poke another person, relatively unknown to you, is socially acceptable. Her ability to communicate was not limited by her inability to verbalise; instead she was more consciously tuned into the body language and subtle signs we all use to convey meaning, which, in
the hearing world, we stop relying on past babyhood. Her non-verbalisation was particularly engaging for the youngest of children, who were drawn to how she mirrored their heightened awareness of the non-verbal speaking we all do. She, of course, would have been no less able to tell me of her favourite childhood day out; she still has memories, cognitive connections with sensory associations attached to them. It is just that she uses a different language to convey what she means to others.
