Verbalosity

I have become drawn to the blog of a dad whose daughter has a really unusual disability that prevents her from speaking. Her dad started blogging, then turned the blog into a fascinating book, "Schuyler's Monster". The blog is at:
http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/
I'm probably not supposed to just post that, but really, does anyone care?
Anyway, reading the book and following this blog have made me wonder about that mystery of speech. Again, since I spent a lot of time teaching ESL, getting a masters in that field which included a fair chunk of linguistics, and now working with and studying about people with all kinds of disabilities, which often include speech, I wonder. I wonder a lot actually. I wonder about my nephew, who hears everything and comprehends almost everything, yet struggles to speak, and given the choice, usually won't. Yet I have also seen him deliver multi sentence, multi thought speeches when moved to do so, that appear to be extemporaneous. I wonder about a kid I work with, a sophomore, with demonstrably above average intelligence, who struggles to communicate with his teachers or his support staff, particularly when upset or stressed. Which is often. With him I often fall into a sort of guessing game, where I throw out diferent scenarios of what might be bothering him and wait to see which one he reacts to. But that is a crutch, and I have to pull back from it because it's not going to help him out in Real World. I know for me speaking IS how I process experience. I'm trying to write more too, but speaking, bouncing my observations off others, helps me understand my world.
It's more than that. Part of my work day is spent in a classroom of students in Japanese I. Watching these kids interact with a new language at its most basic level is really amazing. They are taught very structured sentences and given a few variations to substitute in certain places. But the urge to be creative with language is strong, and although learning to speak in Japanese is not the same as learning to speak English-in Japanese that distinction is sometimes forgotten. Taught to say the word for "cool" specific for air temperature, it's just too tempting to use "cool" in the American way. We want to use language to express who we are. Sometimes it's a tool that doesn't work very well.