THE SPEECH BEHAVIOUR OF INFANTS WITHOUT FAMILIES

Abstract

The research-on infant speech has until recentlybeen mainly concerned with technical problems of measurement and with the establishment of normative sequences of speech development for the young child.As a clinical instrument these norms look extremely promising; they offer standardizations obtained from a large number of cases on the basis of which one may measure deviations in a manner similar to that used in intelligence testing (1).Interest in this research area has gradually been shifting, however, in another direction.While these norms undoubtedly will offer a basis on which one may objectively determine the speech status of any individual child with respect to the sampled population, they tell us little by themselves about the relevant variables which have contributed to the status.Nor do they, therefore, tell us anything about the possibility or desirability of changing a specific individual's status.If such variables could be isolated we might achieve theoretical knowledge, as well as a diagnostic measure, of language acquisition during the earliest stages of the life history and its relation to the later acquisition of more complex symbolic habits.If we started with children who diverged markedly from the speech norms established by recent investigators, it is quite possible that common causal factors in their environment contributing to .thedeviations could be discovered.If such factors could be found, they might be varied in a reasonably controlled situation, so as to experimentally weight their differential influence.Such a program would be costly and tedious to realize, however, and probably would have to be done through amorphous clinical channels.If, on the other hand, we could find homogeneous populations which differed as a group with the norms established thus far, research would not be so technically encumbered.We have a technique that meets these requirements in what the anthropologists call "cross-cultural comparisons."Now, one of the basic criteria used by the anthropologists to distinguish cultures is the structure of the family group, broadly conceived.It is predominantly within this institution, under the guidance of parents as cultural surrogates, that the individual learns a complex set of responses which carry over into interactions with more formally organized institutions.Any difference in the character of the family structure and/or its cultural 145

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