The linguistic advantage of the intellectually gifted child: an empirical study of spontaneous speech.

Commenting on the state of research on giftedness in the 1980s, Janos and Robinson (1985) lament:

   As real as definitional problems
   are, they proved secondary in
   importance to the paucity of
   substantive empirical research
   of a truly developmental nature.
   The literature provided few
   cross-sectional or longitudinal
   studies and even fewer investigations
   matching advanced and
   average children on mental age
   or any other developmental
   dimension. (p. 150)

Not much has changed in this regard in the field since then. In addition to the gaps that Janos and Robinson identified, I would include several others that seem striking to a researcher outside the field, especially a linguist. For one, even though high verbal ability is commonly associated with giftedness, the handful of empirical studies on the linguistic skills of gifted children has generally focused on reception (listening, reading) and hardly any on production (speaking, writing). (1) For another, verbal ability has often been assessed in testing environments, thus severely restricting or view of the range of linguistic performance. This is unfortunate, considering that competence in a natural language entails the ability to function spontaneously in diverse social settings. Add to that the absence of any detailed analysis of the linguistic productions of gifted children and the gaps in research on giftedness become all the more apparent in this area.

Fortunately, there is a solid body of search on the linguistic development of children in the general population in the field of first language acquisition. Because studies of this type focus on the acquisition of very specific linguistic features, the researchers are then able to infer the strategies and cognitive processes that must have or have not been used by their child subjects. This gives us a way to measure the verbal ability of gifted children--if we start to accumulate similar data. Comparison of the verbal abilities of gifted and nongifted children will then offer insight on how their mental operations might be different or similar.

As a step in this direction, this study presents the spontaneous productions in natural settings of a gifted bilingual child from birth to age 7. Linguistic analysis of the corpus indicates how early verbal ability may have what linguists call a "snowballing effect," amplifying advantages that foster subsequent growth exponentially. The linguistic analysis is accompanied by discussion of pertinent cognitive processes and comparison with typically developing children.

When we talk of high verbal ability, it is hard to avoid using the term "creative." But the form of creativity involved here is different from the traditional concept, in which it tends to be defined in terms of excellence in end product following a long period of incubation and revision. The type of creativity involved in speedy, spontaneous productions--called "expressive creativity" by Taylor (1959)--has attracted less research attention. Yet, as shown below, spontaneous linguistic creativity can offer glimpses of the cognitive mechanisms underlying giftedness.

Methodology

Subject

The subject, Charisse, is the author's second-born child. The one parent/one language approach was adhered to, with the author using Cantonese only and the father English, each being a native speaker of the language involved. (2) Charisse has a brother 2 years her senior. The children converse in English with each other. Charisse's early language prior to attending preschool at age 2 was fairly equally distributed between the two languages. But, as expected in an English-dominant environment outside the home, her production of Cantonese diminished gradually after age 3 even though her comprehension of Chinese kept pace with that of English. She continued to be able to follow instructions in Cantonese, reply (mostly in English) to caretakers' Cantonese speech, and translate Cantonese into English spontaneously for her father.

At the age of 6 while in kindergarten, intelligence and achievement tests were administered to Charisse in English to determine if grade acceleration was needed. Creativity tests were also given at the same time. For the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) test, her scores were 135 for Verbal Scale IQ, 132 for Performance Scale IQ, and 137 for Full Scale IQ. Her Full Scale IQ score was considered an underestimation of her general intellectual capacity because of scores at the ceiling for Comprehension, Coding, and Symbol Search. In the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second Edition (WIAT-II) tests, she performed at the 99 percentile (total composite) for her age-based scores and Grade-One-based scores, 86 percentile for Grade-Two-based scores. In the Torrance Tests of Creativity, high scores were registered for originality (three standard deviations above the norm) and elaboration (two standard deviations above the norm).

Procedure

Because the subject was the author's child, she was under continuous observation from birth. Charisse's verbal productions (new words/variants) were recorded weekly by the author in narrow transcription with International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbols in a journal until the adult target forms were reached. (3) These transcriptions were done within at most 3 hours of production. Where it was deemed helpful, Charisse's perceptual abilities at that time were recorded as well. From age 2;0 (two years, zero months) onwards, when full sentences had appeared and it was no longer feasible to record every production, only novel combinations or unusual utterances were noted. For utterances open to ambiguous interpretation, their contexts of usage were also recorded in the journal. Additional verification for accuracy of the journal entries was provided by twice monthly 5- to 10-minute video recordings for the first 3 years and less frequent recordings spaced at 3-month intervals on average thereafter. Charisse's productions in the video recordings were transcribed by the author immediately after each session and rechecked 6 months later for intra-rater reliability. There was 95% agreement between the two sets of transcriptions, with the small amount of discrepancy resulting from noise in the recordings.

Only spontaneous productions (reflecting natural ability) from birth to 7;2 were considered in the present study. Imitations were thus excluded from the corpus. In line with research in first language acquisition, only spontaneous items hat were both phonetically and semantically appropriate to the communicative situation as well as consistent in form were accepted as being part of Charisse's production repertoire. Comprehension proficiency, which preceded production abilities, was not considered in this study.

Linguistic Productions

Phonology 

In study after study on first language acquisition (see Ritchie & Bhatia, 1999), we encounter evidence of the restricted capacity of the child to perform and coordinate the processes underlying the retrieval, planning, and production of an utterance. Therefore, we want to see whether the gifted child is subject to similar production restrictions, and if not, what processing advantages she might be operating under. These manifest themselves in various ways in the present study. For example, fricative and affricate consonants, which tend to appear late in child language due to articulatory challenges, showed up surprisingly early in Charisse's speech. For example, [[sy.sup.55]] 'book' with the fricative [s] appeared as the fifteenth word in her lexical inventory at age 1;5, when she was adamant about getting books read to her constantly? In contrast, Locke's (1983) cross-linguistic survey of the order of phoneme acquisition (consonants and vowels) lists [s] as the penultimate consonant to be acquired in Cantonese while So and Dodd (1995) find that only 75% of their 268 Cantonese subjects had acquired it by 2;6-3;0. A month later at 1;6, the affricate [ts], also a late-acquired item in Locke's survey and So and Dodd's cross-sectional study, was used by Charisse repeatedly in [tsek tse] (for [[tsoek.sup.33] [tsai.sup.35]] 'bird'). The English affricate [dz] at the beginning of juice was produced reliably at 1;5. Widely recognized as a difficult phoneme to acquire, [dz] was produced stably in Schnitzer and Krasinski's (1994, 1996) bilingual children only at 2;2-2;5 and Prather, Hedrick, and Kern's (1975) monolingual English subjects at 4;0-4;6. By being able to use articulate speech early, the linguistically capable child has "considerable, if not constant, access to semantically related" (Snow, 1986, p. 82) adult utterances, thus allowing her to gain even more from such exchanges. In contrast, research shows that children with poor articulation do not offer much interpretable material for the adult to expand upon and are thus hampered further by deficient speech environments.

Morphology

The appearance of first words marks an important juncture in cognitive development. It signals both association between the label and the object as well as recognition of their separation from each other (McCall, Eichorn, & Hogarty, 1977). Since we know that children accumulate receptive language long before they start to speak, their first expressive words are likely directed by the motive to communicate their meanings to others: "As such, children who express their first words sooner might be those who are more motivated to share mental meanings with others through verbal dialogue" (Tamis-Lemonda, Bornstein, Kahana-Kalman, Baumwell, & Cyphers, 1998, p. 678). Like other gifted children, Charisse uttered her first words early, [n[E.sup.33] n[E.sup.33]] for [[nai.sup.33] [nai.sup.33]] 'milk' and Mama at 7 months.

In their report of 30 early talkers, Dale and Robinson (1988) show how the course of normal linguistic development can be accelerated morphologically. They found bound morphemes (prefixes or suffixes) appearing much earlier than that reported by Brown's (1973) oft-cited longitudinal study of three typically developing children. Brown's results match those of de Villiers and de Villiers's (1973) cross-sectional study of 21 children, both reporting the possessive morpheme to be acquired when mean length utterance (MLU) is 3.0-3.99 morphemes. Like Dale and Robinson's verbally precocious subjects, Charisse consistently used the possessive s at the two-word/morpheme stage (MLU=2), as in Dada's, Mama's, and Koko's ('big brother' in Chinese). In fact, in the case of Dale and Robinson's subjects, they did not even follow Brown's prediction that bound morphemes are acquired only after the MLU=2 stage is reached.

In the present study, word formation processes to create new forms emerged noticeably early, as in compounding with -head (e.g., snackhead, giant poopyhead at 2;8). By age 6, Charisse was frequently heard making strings of compounds such as the-upside-down nose and the sudden-awakeners. In her study of early writing talent, Piirto (1992) notes unusual use of strings of modifiers as characteristic, for example, red-shining back by an 8-year-old writer (p. 178). All these require the suspension of the key referent (the noun) while descriptive modifiers are piled on top of it, a task--especially if conducted spontaneously--requiring expanded mental capacity. It explains why the young children (1;6-4;4) in Ninio's (2004) study experienced difficulty integrating the information furnished by the adjective and the information furnished by the noun, even when the former is already present in the subjects' lexicon.

Lexicon

Studies show that early vocabularies tend to lack any layering, with superordinate class labels (e.g., animal as opposed to dog, cat) missing even up to the age of 3 (Griffiths, 1986; Peters & Zaidel, 1980; Rescorla, 1981). In Charisse's lexicon, animal, bear, and dog showed up at 1;6;fruit, apple, apple juice at 1;7. Griffiths speculated that comprehension of plural inflection (i.e., that there are many members to a category), typically missing before age 2, might be a precondition for the layering of vocabulary into superordinates. Because Charisse was already using the plural rule productively by 1;7 (e.g., wash hands), it may explain why the structure of her lexicon would also be more sophisticated.

The early appearance of temporal markers such as now, after, before, then, and first by 2;3 allowed for extended narratives atypical at this age. The acquisition of these items conferred a social advantage in enabling her to converse at length with adults (see Social Competence below).

Nelson's (1973) longitudinal research on 18 children and Benedict's (1979) study of 8 subjects show the first 50 words acquired to be restricted to just a few lexical types, such as nominals, action words, personal-social words (e.g., bye, no), modifiers (e.g., hot, allgone), and locatives (e.g., here). Charisse's early lexicon contained other lexical types that allowed her to engage in negotiations with others (e.g., quantifier-like forms). These include either, too, both at 2;3, and by 3;3 she was heard negotiating: "Can I have a bit? Can I have much? Can I have too much?"

Modality 

Modality--the speaker's expression of necessity, possibility, ability, and volition--is almost completely missing from early child language (Stephany, 1986). In English, modality is marked by, among others, modal verbs (e.g., may, could), moods (e.g., subjunctive, conditional sentences), adjectives (possible, likely), and cognitive verbs (believe, doubt).

Children are not expected to understand the function of cognitive verbs in expressing speaker certainty until about the age of 4 (Moore, Bryant, & Furrow, 1989; Moore & Davidge, 1989), and not until age 7 do they have a mature understanding of epistemic sodality related to degree of possibility.

Cognitive verbs showed up early in Charisse's language, for example, think (2;4), wonder (3;0), understand (3;3), and know (3;3). By the age of 5, she was constantly prefacing her statements with I realize that, I'm amazed that, and I doubt that (5;0). She was already using conditional sentences in her third year--"You don't have to do it if you don't want to" (2;3)--as a way of regulating herself and the behavior of others. Normally, conditional clauses only present themselves at around 6 to 7 years (Loban, 1976).

When Charisse's father displayed his exasperation with her unwillingness to go to bed every night at 3;9, she used the modality of necessity in responding: "Little people are 'upposed to do that." At the same age, Charisse changed the modal function of her preschool teacher's expression. Her teacher's constant reprimand took the form of (deontic) obligation to a higher authority: "You may not do that. That is not possible." Safe at home, Charisse cheerfully converted it into self-directed volition: "Whatever you want to do, you do. Whatever you don't want to do, you don't do. That's a possibility."

Syntax

Researchers in first language acquisition view the production of the first 50 words (or so) as an important juncture because it is often accompanied by a vocabulary spurt and the onset of multiword utterances. This linguistic milestone is associated with changes to children's conceptual development essential to understanding of object permanence (Lifter & Bloom, 1989) and object categorization (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987). The transition to combinatorial speech--perhaps facilitated by increased synaptic connectivity (Bates, Thai, & Janowsky, 1992)--signals global cognitive changes that extend beyond the linguistic (Tamis-Lemonda, Bomstein, Kahana-Kalman, Baumwell, & Cyphers, 1998). This is evident in the shift from single to sequenced acts in symbolic play and in advances in general classifying skills (e.g., Shore, O'Connell, & Bates, 1984).

The clear division between one- and two-word stages was, however, obliterated in the present case study. Charisse made up productive phrases of the type "bump a head" and "read a book" (1;5) and "Mama help" (1;6) before accumulating 50 words.

Since girls are known to display an early advantage in language acquisition, we need to compare Charisse's rate of development with other female subjects. In Menyuk, Liebergott, and Schultz's (1995) large group study across socioeconomic classes, girls reached the MLU=1.5 stage at 1;10 compared to 1;5 for Charisse; MLU = 2.5 at 2;1 versus 1;7; and MLU = 3.0 at 2;5 versus 1;9. (5) Note the short intervals between each stage for Charisse. The appearance of combinatorial speech is instructive because it gives us insight on the child's ability to infer and encode relations between entities symbolically (McCall, Eichorn, & Hogarty, 1977).

More illuminating than observations of utterance length is the type of sentences produced. One of Charisse's early complex sentences was "Dada, even though you gave me ginger, you're pretty lucky because I still love you" recorded at 3;3. The complexity of the sentence lies partly in the fact that it contains not two but three clauses and partly in the temporal change (from gave to love). For a comparison, we actually need to turn to studies of older children. In Loban's (1976) classic large-scale 7-year study of elementary school children, he finds that it was not until about 8 to 10 years of age that they began to relate particular concepts to particular ideas using connectors, and even then, only about half of his subjects were using the subordinating connector although correctly. Harpin (1976) confirms that although-type clauses emerge late, being used only once in every 200 subordinate clauses by 11-year-old writers.

In her review of research on children's speech and writing, Perera (1986) finds that syntactically complex structures first appear in the latter. Writing practice enables children to produce these structures in spontaneous speech later. Thus, relative clauses are rare in the spontaneous speech of two- to five-year-olds, who prefer to string out information rather than embed one clause into another (Ingram, 1989, p. 476). Compare this to Charisse's oral statement at 4;8: "Mama, I like the person you married, and I like the person who married you." What is striking about this sentence is not just the comparatively young age when it was produced but the complexity of the underlying structure. In the first part of the sentence, the person is understood underlyingly to be the object (you married [the person]). In the second part, the person is associated with the subject (who) of the relative clause (who married you). This switch from object to subject is possible because the verb marry is bidirectionally transitive. Charisse had to be able to appreciate this property of the verb to construct the sentence. Word order alteration for thematic continuity did not show up in the speech of 12-year-olds in Handscombe's (1967) study.

It has been found that across languages, the different types of questions appear in a similar sequence in first language acquisition: yes/no questions first, what questions (object identity) second, where questions (object location) third, and why and when questions (causal and temporal anchoring of events) fourth (Berman, 1986). Language acquisition in this regard is thus highly determined by conceptual development. Looking closely at the subject's production of question types thus gives us a glimpse at cognitive ability. One of Charisse's earliest recorded questions at 2;2 was of the last type: "Why I no swim?" (meaning "Why don't I get to swim?").

Even when the question asked is of an earlier type, we still need to consider its content. For example, a what question recorded at 2;6 is different from the kind referred to in Berman's study: "Dada, what's 'module' mean?" Here, Charisse was not asking for the identity of an object. She was picking out unfamiliar words from the speech stream of adult conversation. She was using language to find out about language.

From there, it is but a short step to our finding evidence of conscious manipulation of language in her corpus, as when she asked a rhetorical question at 2;8. After listening intently to her father's lecture on the Big Bang Theory and his emphasis on how no one really knows about the origin of the universe, she said in response: "You know what? My theory is, BOOOKA! (meaning hogwash)." Soon after, the idiomatic expression "What's the deal?" began to show up, as when Charisse at 2;11 tried to join in a group activity.

Gifted children are noted for their interest in abstract topics beyond the here and now, whereas first language acquisition research shows the typical child speech and parent-child conversations being primarily concrete and functional in nature. The questions asked by Charisse are typical of high-intelligence children: How did the first person come about (4;9)? Where did the trees/chemicals come from (4;10)? What's love (4;10)? What's life about (4;10)? How do we get shapes and colors (4;10)? Why is our skin like this (4;10)? How did the first person talk (4;10)? Even though this is a commonly observed trait of gifted children, it bears saying that they are capitalizing on their high verbal ability to gain even more world knowledge in an advantageous cycle whose benefits are felt way beyond the language domain. Even a yes/no type of question can be out of the ordinary, as is apparent in Charisse's challenge at 5;3 to the status of our household's no-TV-on-weekdays policy: "Is that a real, real law of the court or just your law?"

Braun-Lamesch (1972) demonstrates that 3- to 4-year-olds cannot easily infer the meaning of nonsense words in otherwise straightforward utterances. The interpretation of such utterances would require reliance on solely linguistic cues for meaning, which young children normally do not do. At the age of 4;7, Charisse served as a subject for an Introduction to Linguistics class experiment, where the undergraduates gave her sentences containing nonsense words in various syntactic positions, e.g., I dippled home from school in the afternoon. She was able not only to infer the meaning of the coined words but also to answer in the right grammatical category.

Semantic and Syntactic Logic

The examples in the preceding section hint at sensitivity to the semantic and syntactic logic of natural language. Linguistic creativity, love of language play and riddles have been used to characterize children of high verbal ability (e.g., Henderson & Jackson, 1993). This is in sharp contrast to studies of the general population, which show disregard for linguistic cues (e.g., word order or inflectional markers) in favor of extra-linguistic knowledge (such as familiarity or plausibility) for interpreting language (Berman, 1986).

Sensitivity to, and appreciation of, linguistic cues lead to playfulness with language characteristic of gifted children. At 3;0, Charisse fooled her father by changing the scope of negation in her statement: "Dada, tonight I'm not going to scream, and whine, and kick. [Pause] I'm just going to scream and whine." From the first sentence, the expected interpretation would be to negate all three actions; the negator not has scope over scream, whine, and kick. But the following sentence demands a re-interpretation where the negator has narrow scope over only the last verb. Bloom's (1991) longitudinal study of three typically developing children echoes previous research concluding that negative sentences tend to be significantly shorter than their affirmative counterparts, possibly owing to "cognitive limitation in handling structural complexity" (p. 161). If negation normally "costs" a child extra cognitive effort (Bloom, p. 23), we need to ask how a gifted child is able to compensate for it.

By 4;11 Charisse found syllogisms easy and asked for such mental challenges often. She also started constructing her own at this time, as in "Jimmy loves orange juice. He went to the store, but they only had apple juice and milk. So did he buy anything?" When her respondent said "no," Charisse corrected her: "I didn't say 'Jimmy loves only orange juice.' There may be other things at the store he likes." Then Charisse proceeded to ask if her respondent would like to try "the same kind of puzzle or a different kind." Thus, in addition to responsiveness to linguistic cues, the gifted child also demonstrates metalinguistic awareness.

Often, Charisse's logic skills in language interacts with social roles in ways unexpected to her listener, as in the following exchange at 3;3. Soon after the present researcher (inadvertently) related an incident when she had not followed her mother's advice, Charisse proceeded to cut a fruit on her palm. Told to stop at once, she said laughingly: "Mama, I'm going to be just like you. I'm not going to listen to my mother."

Metaphoric Use

The task of learning a language does not merely involve deriving conventional word senses but stepping "beyond the lexicon" to use it creatively (Gottfried, 1997, p. 568). This kind of "linguistic flexibility" may manifest itself in metaphoric use. The standard metaphor involves "cases in which a word (or phrase) is transported from its customary context to a novel domain, and in which such a transfer is deemed appropriate (rather than anomalous) by the community" (Winner, McCarthy, & Gardner, 1980, p. 343). Other than the classic form of X is Y (e.g., my love is like a red, red rose), we may include in this category metaphoric conversions (e.g., noun used as verb) and transference of verbs typically associated with particular contexts to other settings.

In Gottfried's (1997) experiments on metaphoric comprehension by 3- to 5-year-olds, it was found that this age group can deal with a very restricted type of metaphor involving only shapes. This complements Flavell, Green, and Flavell's (1987) studies concluding that 3-year-olds have trouble maintaining simultaneous representations of what an object is and what it looks like (identity and appearance). Contrast these findings with Charisse's self-invented metaphors. (Note that literature on metaphors in child language involves only reception, not the more difficult challenge of spontaneous production as reported here.) The first recorded instance of a verbal metaphor occurred at a restaurant where two infants were crying incessantly, vexing the other diners. Still a toddler herself at that time, Charisse announced: "Let's flick those two babies out of here" (3;4). Prior to this, she had heard and used the verb flick repeatedly in reference to dealing with insects (pests). An example of a metaphoric conversion was recorded at 4;7. At a party where the living room floor was scattered with infants in their bouncers, Charisse remarked: "This room is littered with babies. " Notwithstanding the playful use of litter in the procreative sense (which I cannot confirm she was consciously applying in this instance), the other sense (of throwaways on the ground) involves a metaphoric conversion from the noun litter to the verb. By the end of her 6th year, metaphors showed up abundantly in her speech, e.g., "Moms invade the earth with kisses." "In the distance of my life, I will ...," "It's when you're tired that you spit out the real truth!" (6;11).

Ambiguity

Research on young children shows that their limited use of language results in the lack of appreciation for ambiguity. Typical 3- to 5-year-olds tend to interpret only one meaning of a homonymic pair. Even when presented with both members of the pair in story contexts, Beveridge and Marsh (1991) find that their 4-year-old subjects still restricted word meanings to the primary one known to them. This may be due to either the use of a one-label-to-one-object mapping strategy (Peters & Zaidel, 1980) or contextual restrictions (Deak, Yen, & Pettit, 2001). Up to the age of 6, children still fail to discern ambiguity in utterances heard, which explains why they generally do not ask for clarification (Flavell, Speer, Green, & August, 1981). In fact, the problem remains up until 7;0-8;11, perhaps as a result of immature metacognitive skills in terms of selective attention (Mazzocco, Myers, Thompson, & Desai, 2003).

In the present case study, it is not clear whether the subject's bilingualism might have helped to remove the one-to-one mapping restriction early. (See the Discussion for research on bilingualism.) The minute Charisse found out that there was another meaning to a phrase, she would actively seek opportunities to exploit the ambiguity. For instance, when she told her teacher that her mother was a "good looker" because she could find anything (3;1), her teacher laughed and explained the nonliteral meaning to her. That very night, Charisse tried out her new discovery on her father: "Dada, I know why you married Mama-because she's a good looker."

Her trip to Asia at the age of 3 offered Charisse even more opportunities to engage in this kind of language play with double meanings. Many involved on-the-spot transfers from one language to another. Taught how to count for the first time in Japanese, Charisse learned that 'one' is "ichi. " She immediately joked with her Japanese teacher: "You have an itchy?" (3;3). At the same age, when she took a long time to decide what to drink, she was told in Cantonese to hurry up because the flight attendant was about to walk away ([[ci.sup.22] [tsau.sup.35]] '[she] wants [to] leave'). Charisse grinned and replied she wanted beer, also pronounced [[ci.sup.22] [tsau.sup.35]] '(I) want beer'. (6) This type of linguistic behavior raises questions as to the operation of the mutual exclusivity constraint (one label for one object), a common strategy found in the acquisition processes of monolingual children in the general population that both help and hinder development (Davidson, Jergovic, Imami, & Theodos, 1997).

Humor

By now, it should be clear that Charisse loves indulging in witticisms. Witticisms are tied to the context of utterance, often where humor is not expected (Long & Graesser, 1988). Their appreciation depends on knowledge of the topic of conversation, and sometimes knowledge of the speaker as well. Incongruity resolution theory (Koestler, 1964) is worth mentioning here only insofar that some of Charisse's witticisms did involve activation of one domain of knowledge superimposed on another domain. In addition, this type of natural humor creates an "optimally varied and interesting environment" for a person who thrives on such stimulation (McGhee, 1979, p. 166).

At 2;8, Charisse received from her father a pep talk about striving for the impossible. The clashing of two planes of thought is evident in the following exchange:

Father: You can do anything you want to do.

Charisse: Anything?

Father: Anything is possible.

Charisse: Can I hit you in the eye?

Charisse's type of humor is very different from that of typical preschool children. Children this age find humor primarily in incongruous appearance of objects (McGhee, 1979). This perceptual "centeredness" is due to the development of concepts of objects based primarily on their prominent perceptual features, and even then children have difficulty keeping all these traits in mind simultaneously. Charisse's witticism, on the other hand, goes beyond focus on end-states to associations across bodies of knowledge.

The Piagetian concept of "reversibility," the application of a previous experience to a new situation, is evident in another of her witticisms. In this example at 6;8, Charisse had heard us talk about the current trend in youth slang of using the amplifier so in ways different from the traditional one of so + adjective (e.g., This is so not right, I so need a drink, You're so going the right way). About a week later, her brother had difficulty recalling the proper name of a type of triangle: "I know this one. It's an iso ... iso." Charisse teased: "I so don't know what it is."

Compared to the early presence of Charisse's witticisms, McGhee (1979), in his book on humor in the young, reports that only in adolescence do we begin to find spontaneous wit. We might ask what the relationship is between humor and giftedness. McGhee (1979) believes that humor offers an intellectual form of pleasure derived from the cognitive challenge of creating it. Furthermore, according to him, the imaginative and linguistic spheres are the only ones the child can exercise control over, whereas other areas of her life are under other people's direction.

Note, therefore, the strong correlation between humor and social competence. Both involve cognitive processes underlying the comprehension and elaboration of information in terms of previously acquired concepts and general knowledge (Wyer & Collins, 1992). This link between humor and sensitivity to social information is illustrated by Charisse's concoction of a song, "I Dream of a Womb," knowing full well that our amusement comes from the fact that the I in the song was merely 6 years old.

Social competence

It has been found that intellectually capable children perform well in tasks involving social problem solving, social knowledge, and perceptual/conceptual/ affective perspective-taking (see Janos & Robinson, 1985 for list of studies). In the language arena, the types and distribution of children's speech acts would offer further insight into their social competence, cognitive maturity, and processing capacity, thus leading us closer to an explanation for the reported link.

For the 2-year-old, we expect a conversational move called a "Continue" to be difficult (Menyuk, Liebergott, & Schultz, 1995, p. 116). In this act, the child continues on a conversation with a verbal response to a previous utterance on the same topic, expecting to evoke another response. This requires "more language sophistication than the 2-year-old has achieved" at a stage when the child is still highly dependent on nonverbal cues (Menyuk, Liebergott, & Schultz, 1995, p. 116). A Continue demands reliance on what was said rather than what was done. By no means the earliest recorded example of a Continue, the following excerpt illustrates Charisse's linguistic and social dexterity at 2;0:

Context: Charisse's brother, Kieran, had hurled a cup from the backseat while their car was in motion. Later when their father returned from work, he asked about Kieran's misdeed.

Father: Kieran, do you have anything to say to me?

Kieran: (softly) No.

Charisse: (grinning) A secret!

Father: (to Charisse) You're too much.

Charisse: Just a little bit!

Early social competence has a snowballing effect, and linguistic research shows specifically what the effects are. For one, "socially competent children elicit more or more effective vocabulary learning experiences" from adults (Bornstein, Haynes, & Painter, 1998, p. 389). From the time she could speak, Charisse and her brother struck up conversations with adults easily, such that they knew, for example, every staff member of their favorite restaurants, their backgrounds, their interests, and the like, and hence gained vicarious experience and knowledge normally inaccessible to children their age. Given the fact that studies have found close correlation between adult input and child vocabulary (Barnes, Gutfreund, Satterly, & Wells, 1983), we can see how these encounters with adults in diverse settings might benefit the verbally precocious child.

In many ways, gifted children, through their inquisitiveness and responsiveness, induce rich speech environments that accelerate their development. Research has found that children whose speech is highly repetitive are "less interesting to converse with than children who frequently introduce new topics" (Snow, 1986, p. 83). By the same token, mothers of withdrawn children engage in less contingent verbal interaction with them (LaFreniere & Dumas, 1992). As expected, Paul, Looney, & Dahm (1991) found that children ages 1;6-2;10 with low socialization skills are also slow in expressive vocabulary acquisition.

Social interaction involves planning, monitoring, and outcome-checking skills executed in problem-solving (Moss, 1992). Advances in memory, problem solving, and representation skills at the beginning of the third year account for the emergence of self-regulatory behavior when children can redirect attention more flexibly as demanded by the social context. Enhanced information processing would therefore bestow an advantage upon gifted children by allowing them to display abilities that cue their adult listeners that they are ready for higher levels of interaction, whereby existing competencies can be extended to a greater range of scenarios. As Moss explains, it is likely that "parents of gifted children are encouraged to focus interactions on a metacognitive level by these cues evident in their children's task performance and conversational style" (p. 308). This ability to redirect attention for the purpose of reaching an overall goal would signal to the adult that the child is ready to participate in joint planning and monitoring operations (Moss, p. 312).

Discussion

Let me begin this section by reiterating Bruner's (1983) emphatic statement in his book, Child's Talk:

   It is not the case that language,
   when it is encountered and then
   used, is the first instance of
   abstract rule following ... abstract
   distinctions, picked up with
   amazing speed in language
   acquisition, have analogues in
   the child's way of ordering his
   world of experience. Language
   will serve to specify, amplify,
   and expand distinctions that the
   child has already about the
   world. But these abstract distinctions
   are already present,
   even without language. (p. 30)

Having stressed this point, let me suggest nevertheless that research on gifted children's spontaneous speech can offer insight on their mental structures and functions owing to a long and systematic tradition of investigation of natural language and first language acquisition that we can draw upon.

The present study may be viewed as a first step in the development of a body of empirical evidence, similar to the extensive data collection of just a handful of children by Bloom (1970), Braine (1971), Brown (1973), and Bowerman (1976) early in child language research. If the methodology is sufficiently rigorous and the case study findings are later supplemented by those of large group sampling, as happened in first language acquisition, then questions of subjectivity and selectivity of evidence can be addressed satisfactorily. In fact, the original child language data have since been reanalyzed repeatedly in subsequent research employing different theoretical models. One way to determine if a child's utterance should be included in her production repertoire is to look for patterns in her speech. For example, in the present case, the expression "What's the deal?" was considered only after finding similar idiomatic utterances of the type "That's the deal" used appropriately at the same age.

Broadly speaking, there are two general research approaches in first language acquisition based on the fundamental paradox: how does a child learn a system as complex as natural language so speedily? The Chomskyan solution is to hypothesize an innate, universal grammar, leading to investigations on when certain parameters of this grammar are set in the acquisition of different languages. The Piagetian approach is more integrative in nature, involving exploration of general constraints on cognitive functioning in language development (see Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980). As can be inferred from the linguistic features discussed above, the present study relies more heavily on this integrative orientation. A third approach, the emergentist (MacWhinney, 1999), is still too new for us to determine its relevance to our study of high verbal ability.

Within these broad frameworks is a diversity of models focusing on different languages, different aspects of language, different contexts, and even different populations. Thus, application of research findings in first language acquisition to the study of giftedness requires careful selection across a broad spectrum of ideologies and methods. In some cases, as I have done above, we may even need to step out of the current research climate to investigate an aspect that is no longer in vogue politically. Our research, therefore, has to be data-driven. As Bloom (1991) says:

   it seems to be more profitable
   to describe such facts of child
   language on their own terms, by
   identifying and interpreting
   speech events according to
   shared features of situational
   context and linguistic form
   rather than in terms of goodness
   of fit with one or another preconceived
   system of analysis or
   linguistic theory. (p. 65)

The question as to the effect of bilingualism on the subject's linguistic and cognitive development is harder to address due to the paucity of evidence in this area. This is especially so when we consider the languages involved in this case. Also, the present study involves the simultaneous development of two languages from birth (called "infant bilingualism") while much of second language acquisition research deals with the later learning of a foreign tongue. Early studies in the 1920s-1960s examining the relationship between cognitive/intellectual functioning and bilingualism all reported negative consequences of bilingualism (Darcy 1953; Jensen, 1962). The major turning point occurred with Peal and Lambert's (1962) study of bilingualism in Montreal. When variables such as socioeconomic class and strength of each language were controlled, the bilingual group was found to perform significantly better on most measures of verbal and nonverbal intelligence. In general though, when we look closely at particular aspects of development, we find mixed results in the literature. When we consider the languages involved in this case, we find negative effects on language learning (e.g., Huang & Hatch, 1978) and academic performance (e.g., Aaronson & Ferres, 1987). A study on the effects of bilingualism on creativity reports that, when given the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, monolingual children performed better on figural fluency and flexibility, while bilinguals did so on figural originality and figural elaboration (Torrance, Gowan, Wu, & Aliotti, 1970).

The case studies in child language research involved mostly college-educated caretakers, and usually the researchers themselves were the parents of the subjects. While questions have been raised about parental role in language development, the picture is a complicated one. Bloom (1991) in her review of the literature disavows a simple causal relation:

   it is more likely that children
   actively search for linguistic
   forms that can represent what
   they want to talk about.... No
   matter how frequently a structure
   occurs in the speech a child
   hears, it can be ignored if it is not
   relevant to the kinds of things the
   child needs to say. (p. 66)

The child's productions in the present study were collected from diverse settings to demonstrate the range of her linguistic ability. In the classroom setting, on the other hand, the teacher only has access to a limited view of her pupil's linguistic competence. Prescribed roles restrict the kind of communicative interaction possible in the classroom; a curriculum geared towards getting all students to meet a minimal level of competence often fails to discover the individual's full potential; and eventually, more often than not, the intellectually capable child resents this lack of opportunity to display and develop her true proficiency in school and withdraws even further from any such demonstration. The result is a clash between parents' observations outside of school and teachers" assessments. Ironically, to accommodate a child's special needs, schools usually demand the "objective" measures of IQ and achievement testing--even though these can only reveal a narrow aspect of her ability.

Conclusion

The present case study represents an initial attempt at bridging the gap between theoretical formulation and empirical evidence for research on verbal precocity. The linguistic evidence raises numerous questions pertaining to cognitive functioning, domain specificity, and the established intelligence/creativity and analytic/creative dichotomies. Gardner's ideas notwithstanding, linguistic ability is one area that ranges across many domains, from the physical (articulation) to the cognitive and psycho-social. It is indeed difficult, and perhaps pointless, to maintain the above dichotomies in a linguistic study of this type. Language is by nature both open-ended (in the infinite number of possible meanings it can create) and close-structured (in terms of the rules of combinations of its basic elements to produce and interpret these meanings). We thus see the gifted child here acting as both a little linguist and creative humorist in her dexterity at exploiting both qualities.

By pulling in relevant research on children in the general population, I have tried to demonstrate plausible linkages among linguistic, cognitive, and psychosocial development. As a first project of its kind, this study naturally raises more questions than it can answer. Is the snowballing effect seen in various aspects of linguistic development merely acceleration through the stages of growth in Piagetian terms? Or is the development of gifted children different in kind? After all, we have seen traces of the latter in the present case study. Some of the evidence suggests that the normal progression across stages is thwarted phonologically, morphologically, semantically, and syntactically. Driven by a strong desire to communicate mental meanings to others, the gifted child often seems to be able to operate outside of the linguistic and cognitive constraints restricting the general population.

Over and over again, as we sift through the empirical data, we see a significant difference in mental capacity, if only in a metaphoric sense. Many of the linguistic features encountered here are made possible by this expanded capacity. In connectionist terms, we may speculate on efficient neural connectivity or perhaps automatic activation of denser neural networks. The present case study gives a close-up look at this "enhanced information processing" in real time. We see how the intellectually capable child brings two bodies of knowledge together to create humor, holds syntactic components in place mentally to create complex sentences, makes connections across domains to play with language, and accommodates multiple meanings of words to exploit ambiguity. All these are performed easily and speedily. Indeed, this type of linguistic performance is only possible with rapid processing--which is why investigation of spontaneous production has its place in research on giftedness. What cognitive mechanisms underlie such performance impossible for the general population?

The linguistic advantage seen here is also highly dependent on sensitivity to minute cues in language. Sternberg and Lubart (1992) refer to the selective-encoding insight among the gifted. Research on first language acquisition goes further to probe how linguistic cues may be salient along biological dimensions (Peters, 1986). Microanalysis of the linguistic advantage may thus offer a way to explore the neurological foundation of giftedness.

Where language use is involved, psycho-social issues often come to the fore. A lot of the subject's speech can be explained in Vygotskian terms, in her need to assert control over situations where she views herself helpless or vulnerable and is unhappy about the situation. She is motivated to employ language as a tool, and she is an adept tool user.

Sternberg and Lubart's (1992) conception of creative giftedness goes beyond the cognitive to include interaction with the environment. We may begin our investigation with a domain-specific approach for the sake of methodological facility, but soon enough our exploration takes us into many other areas. To stop short is to deny ourselves an account of the nature and development of giftedness rich in empirical detail and insight that could guide theoretical formulation as well as future investigation.

I would like to thank my student Kathryn D. Nixon for her assistance in the preparation of this paper.

(1) One important exception is Piirto's (1992) study of young writing prodigies.

(2) The variety of Cantonese spoken was Malaysian.

(3) The diary study was an extension of a bilingual research project first presented at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in 1998.

(4) Cantonese words are presented in phonetic transcription in [] with lexical tones labeled in numerical superscript except for words lacking tonal accuracy. Their translations in English follow in.

(5) This study investigated the language of full-term and pre-term infants, where no significant differences were recorded for the features relevant to us here.

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Pau-San Hoh is an associate professor of English at Marist College, New York, where she teaches linguistics and writing. She has published papers on syntax (e.g., in Lingua) and writing in mathematics (e.g., in Primus). She is the Marist Coordinator of the Center for Talented Youth Odyssey Series (Johns Hopkins University) and is currently recruiting child subjects for an extension of the research project reported in this paper. Email: [e-mail]

Manuscript submitted May 7, 2004. Revision accepted September 13, 2004.