cover image THE SILENT CHILD: Bringing Language to Children Who Cannot Speak

THE SILENT CHILD: Bringing Language to Children Who Cannot Speak

Laurent Danon-Boileau, , trans. from the French by Kevin Windle. . Oxford Univ., $25 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-19-823786-0

In this absorbing account of the treatment of children who have great difficulty communicating in spoken language, Danon-Boileau, a practicing child psychoanalyst and professor of linguistics and languages at the Sorbonne, draws on the case studies of six of his own patients. With the exception of Pierre, aged 17, his patients were seven years old or younger. Working on the assumption that language development rests on "the wish to build contact with others," Danon-Boileau believes that the younger a child is when he or she enters treatment, the greater the chances of success. In each case, he allows the child to lead him through a course of play therapy; treatment is based on an intuitive sense of what will work for a particular patient rather than on a single method or pedagogy. The analyst found, for example, that by encouraging the adolescent Pierre to draw pictures to represent words facilitated the acquisition of speech. Kim, a four-year-old who expressed herself through a private language, incomprehensible to others, improved somewhat when Danon-Boileau described to her the games she was playing with her toys in exact speech. These observations, coming from a caring and humane therapist, will be of great use to those working in the fields of psychology and linguistics, as well as to the parents of children with speech problems. (Sept.)

Forecast:The cases themselves are mesmerizing, but Danon-Boileau's writing may be a bit academic for many readers. However, an enthusiastic blurb from the well-known Jerome Bruner may help convince fans of Oliver Sacks's books to take the plunge.