With a child with a developmental impairment of speech and / or language, there is an obvious question: Will the child just grow out of it?

Speech

In the speech of children of three and four, yellow as LELO does not generally, and should not, cause any anxiety about speech development, It is developmentally quite normal. But if a seven year old is still saying yellow as LELO, he or she probably does need help – and typically recognises this. But there are both more and less profound degrees of need.

For some individuals the natural pathway of development stops prematurely or fails to complete. If an adult can’t say any long words correctly, this gets noticed. Sometimes it’s obvious. Even if no one is rude enough to point the issue out, speakers are often aware of the problem themselves. Such individuals may regret that their issue was not addressed during their childhood. In adulthood it is much harder to get speech issues addressed.

Language

Issues with ‘syntax‘ and ‘morphology‘ or more informally language are easy to miss, especially as children get older. It was once thought the acquisition of language was mostly complete by around the age of five. It was Carol Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s wife, who in 1969 demonstrated convincingly that this is not quite the case. Some quite subtle aspects of English are, for most children, only gradually emerging up to the age of ten or even later. Carol Chomsky studied various phenomena involving identity and non-identity. Take the verbs, ask, tell, and promise. And consider an imaginary situation with a mouse, a friend and two things to choose between to feed the mouse, a cheese sandwich and a DVD in its box. (I am updating the situation here.) In “Ask your friend what to give the mouse to eat” the experimental issue is whether and at what age the child realises the instruction is about him or her doing the feeding. Carol Chomsky found that even as children approached the age of ten, some still thought the instruction was about the friend doing the feeding. She sets out the quite complex sequence by which children learn this and other quite intricate aspects of English grammar, mostly between the ages of five and ten.

Karen Stromswold (2006) shows that children’s understanding of passive sentences, as in “The cat was bitten by the dog” or “The cat got bitten by the dog” in contrast to the active form in “The dog bit the cat” is by a complex process between the ages of two and seven.

Learning the full syntax of English passives is a difficult, prolonged process. As Julie Anne Legate (2014) shows the English passive represents a most complex combination of word order, the use of by, and changes in the form of the verb. Another aspect of the difficulty here may be due to the fact that both discourse and syntax are involved. In “The cat was bitten”. the cat loses a degree of agency, and the focus shifts to whoever or whatever was doing the biting. This focus shifting is expressed by the syntax. But the two things are separate. Competent English involves playing them together.

By the proposal here, the most fundamental principles of what is known as ‘Universal Grammar‘ are normally established by the age of three. But as Carol Chomsky shows the full complexity of the system, with all of the principles interacting with one another, may be not completely mastered until ten or later, or, for some individuals, never completely mastered.

All of the phenomena of grammar become harder if there are any significant, interacting factors. In the Reynell Developmental Language Scales, one well-known test of what is supposed to be ‘receptive language’, in a scenario where the question is appropriate, the child is asked “Which red pencil has not been put away?” But if the child fails to respond appropriately, it is unclear if the child is confused by the passive, the negation or the complexity of the phrase, red pencil, or any two of these things, or just one.

As Carol Chomsky stresses, in any test or assessment, it is very important to make sure that the child is ready for any task which may be given and understands every element of it. Not an easy thing to do.

Evolution, acquisition, and misconstruals

The acquisition of speech and language is difficult, prolonged, and many sided. There are many possible scenarios. By the proposal here, there was a sequence of evolutionary steps over tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and this is reflected in the acquisition process in humans today. The evidence is partly from the data of children’s speech and language. By this proposal, neither in human evolutionary history nor in the development of a modern child is any other sequence logically possible. But it is very possible for the child to reach a given point, misconstrue the evidence about how to implement it, and then make no further progress for an extended period. For instance, the child learning English might get the idea of a single word, but then mistakenly conclude that English has tones (like Chinese and about half the languages in the world). In such a scenario, that single world will most likely be said with exactly the same sequence of tones whenever it is used. But there will be no further development because the input will seem chaotic with every other word said with whatever combination of tones happens to be perceived, but with no logical or consistent pattern. Or the child may be daunted by the complexity of the acquisition path, and decide (perhaps unconsciously) to hold back until things are clearer. Stromswold (2022) describes what may be such a case.

Natural variation and the point of concern

There is a natural variation in what children learn when. Some are early talkers. Some not. But at a given point a child’s failure to follow anything like the ‘normal schedule‘ becomes a matter of justifiable concern.

People are entitled to decide, I believe, whether they want to be helped or not. Does it matter if a child can’t say one or two long and unusual words? Or can’t say passives? Or says “I promised her to give me a present” – meaning “I persuaded her to promise to give me a present” – or something like that? When is a child ready to decide this for himself or herself? To me, this depends on age, how obvious the issue is, the degree of immaturity or distance from the normal developmental pathway, and in the case of children, the way the family takes decisions.

One factor, perhaps the largest factor, in deciding whether to intervene is whether or not the child appears to be on a natural pathway. Some children just proceed along the natural pathway slower than others, sometimes much slower. But as a delay increases, the case for intervention obviously gets stronger.