Linguistic progress with the “idioglossia” twins “Pinit, putahtraletungay” “Nis, Poto?” “Liba Cabingoat, it” “la moa, Poto?” “Ya” For more than two years the chirpy little girls discussing potato salad so
incomprehensibly in a language clinic at San Diego's Children's
Hospital have been among the world's most celebrated twins. They have
been tested and videotaped, charted phonetically, featured on
television and offered contracts for the film rights to their curious
story. Grace and Virginia Kennedy are now nine. The excitable,
blue-eyed sisters called each other Poto and Cabengo, and sometimes
Madame and Milady. For a while they were thought to be retarded. But at
the same time they seemed to be speaking an original language. At the
very least their exchanges were thought to represent the most developed
form of idioglossia ever recorded in medical history. Idioglossia is a phenomenon, badly documented at best, in which two
individuals, often twins, develop a unique and private language with
highly original vocabulary and syntax. It is commonly confused with a
subcategory, “twin speech,” a private collection of distorted
words and idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or
playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and
Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had
an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in
Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English
and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb:
“I out the pudatoo-ta” . Potato
could be said in 30 different ways. Linguists, speech pathologists and
educators hoped the twins' private communication would offer a rare
window into the mysteries of developing language: How is it balanced
between genetically programmed neurological functions and environmental
stimuli? The twins arrived at the San Diego hospital in 1977 after proving too
bright for schooling designed for the mentally retarded. Shy and
uncommunicative when first tested at the language clinic, the two
little girls would rush into the hallway to compare notes after each
session. Their talk, Clinic Director Chris Hagen told TIME
Correspondent James Willworth, sounded “as if a tape recorder were
turned on fast forward with an occasional understandable word jumping
out.” Ginny and Gracie blossomed with therapy. “It was obvious these kids
hadn't had much exposure to anything,” recalls Speech-Language
Pathologist Alexa Romain, who was assigned to Gracie.
“They wanted attention.” The twins were soon attending severe
language disorder classes at nearby Beale Elementary School and
clinical therapy sessions three times a week. Psycholinguists Richard
Meier and Elissa Newport were brought in from the nearby University of
California campus, to study and decode the girls' hyperspeed chatter.
