In my home town there was a boy who had been trying to understand what his mother was saying to him for all the five years of his life. He would hear the sound of his mother speaking, so he would stop what he was doing, stand in front of her with a toy truck in his hand, and turn his face upon an angle to look at her mouth moving.
“ZZiccatchubb perg holkifer,” she would say, or at least that is what it sounded like.
Well, naturally, he would repeat what she seemed to say. “ZZiccatchubb,” he would say.
His mother, of course, despaired. His father did, too, though he was an easy-going man who usually said that things would turn out all right. So the boy’s parents took him to the family doctor. The doctor touched the boy with his cold metal device, and checked everything, especially the boy’s hearing. His opinion was that the boy was normal in every way except his unfortunate way of talking. There were two possible answers to the family’s question, he suggested. Either the boy was faking it, pretending not to be able to duplicate the language of his parents, or there was some condition of his brain unknown to a family physician. He counseled a visit to a language-acquisition expert at the big university and visit to a pediatric brain specialist.
