In two senses, in the sense of poetry and in the sense of ‘discrete infinity’

Language is creative in two senses, in the sense of poetry, of plays on words and in the sense of what is known as ‘discrete infinity‘. Children’s language is creative in both senses. Both can be problematic for some children. In helping children with impaired speech and language, it is useful to bring both of these two sorts of creativity together.

A functionality with potential

Viewed as a functionality, language is clearly not a behaviour, but a potential. This potential is realised as a child becomes able to understand that the old song about swallowing a fly could go on forever.

Exploiting this potential, the child can say things which have never been said before in the entire course of human history, and yet be understood. As David Adger (2019) points out, this happens far more often and much earlier in children’s lives than we commonly realise.

Testing

A test characteristically involves a number of preset tasks, each representing some arbitrary degree of complexity. For the purpose of helping a child with difficulties in speech and/or language, no set of preset tasks can determine how far the child’s capacities stretch. It is possible, for instance, that a child’s grammar does not include any provision for going beyond simple sentences like  “I tell the truth”. At a given (early) point in the child’s process of language acquisition, by the proposal here, typically by the age of three, the child’s grammar is clearly capable of generating structures with two or more instances of embedding.

As the child grows, a complete failure of embedding points to a significant problem with the grammar,