Mother-tongue
Have you ever heard the blues in Spanish? If you’d listend at my office door last Wednesday afternoon, you would have. After a while, the too-many-burger blues (Song Into Speech, Speech Into Song) morphed into Luis’ mothertongue.
“Luis es enferma!” (I chord). Gales of laughter from Luis.
“No, tu estás enfermo!” Luis manages to gasp out (IV). My attempts at Spanish always crack him up.
“Tu estás enfermo?”(I chord, I keep playing).
More laughter. “Si, tu estás enfermo,”(V-IV) . . .
Before Luis was my client, when he first came to The Lydian Center, he was hardly speaking Spanish at all! This may have been a somewhat isolating experience for him. He could speak with his mother in English, but much of the conversation with his extended family is conducted in Spanish. Chiropractic, acupressure, and nutritional work have seemed to unlock the door to his first language. Sometimes, Luis still sees my colleagues if he’s injured himself, or to work on specific issues of brain rewiring or nutrition. But Luis and I meet every Wednesday afternoon to make MUSIC! For each of us, this session is a weekly treat.
Language is a kind of music, and different languages have different musical signatures. There is evidence that infants in utero can not only recognize their mother’s voices, but also the cadences of their mothertongue. One study used near infra-red spectroscopy to determine how the response of neonates to unfamiliar languages differs from their response to the language that first surrounded them.The researchers concluded that the prenatal experience of mothertongue “influences how the newborn brain responds to language across brain regions sensitive to speech processing.1”
Stuttering is a stress response2. I am using “stress” in the broadest sense here, meaning any kind of extra load on the system. Luis tends to stutter when he is saying something new – a new idea, or telling a story for the first time. It seems as if there is a disconnect between the speed of his thoughts and his ability to create new sentences. Luis also stutters when he gets excited. But I can’t remember ever hearing him stutter in Spanish. It makes sense that returning to the earliest surrounding cadences would create the kind of safety needed for fluent speech.
I speak Spanish with Luis for other reasons. It gives him a realm where he can be the expert and safely correct, me, the adult– which is not something most kids, especially “special needs” kids, get to do very much. Knowing that he knows more than I do never fails to delight him. When I try to speak Spanish, my mistakes always make him laugh. And laughter is a powerful educational tool.
1Language and the Newborn Brain: Does Prenatal Language Experience Shape the Neonate Neural Response to Speech? Lillan May, et al, Frontiers in Psychology, v. 2, 2011.
2In Stuttering: Myth vs. Fact by Beth Gilbert from Psychcentral.com, stuttering specialist Catherine Montgomery says that stuttering is not caused by stress. Then she goes on to suggest a scenario for the first stutter:
“On the first day of preschool, Mommy takes little Michael by the hand to meet his teacher. Smiling, the teacher asks Michael, ‘What’s your name?’ And even though he’s never stuttered before, he says, ‘M-M-Michael.’ And he sees a response — maybe the teacher stops smiling for a minute or Mommy tightens her grip on his hand. Consciously or unconsciously, he may think, ‘I have trouble saying my name.’
“So the next time someone asks his name, he has a memory flash of that first time he had trouble saying his name, which sets up a fight or flight response and he stutters over his name.”
Sounds like stress to me.