Rosa

At four, Rosa was hard tor those who did not know her well to understand at all. She was very distractible, going from one thing to the next in a way that was hard to control. It was impossible to carry out a structured assessment, But from tiny fragments I was able to establish that she had a reasonable grasp, for a child of her age, of the complex snd subtle relation in English between suprasegmental and segmental structure in the way she said hippopotamus. This suggested that her problems were with the detailed implementation of the segments, rather than a more global problem. She was also very theatrical for a child of this age, adding a ‘love song’ to a story, with only the very roughest idea, I think, of what a love song is. Four years on, her speech is age appropriate, but the theatricality is still there.