Emma

At four, Emma was almost impossible for someone who did not know her well to understand. Inconsistency in a child’s speech is one of the hallmarks of disorder. Emma’s speech was highly inconsistent.

She was very distractible, going from one thing to the next in a way that was hard to control.

In the days when people were trying to manage everything online, I mistakenly allowed myself to think that I would be able eventually to establish a relation with her which would allow us to do some formal therapy. 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 to me that her problems were with the detailed implementation rather than