Ginny and Gracie Go to School

Linguistic progress with the "idioglossia" twins "

Pinit, putahtraletungay"(Finish, potato salad hungry)

"Nis, Poto?" (This, Poto?)

"Liba Cabingoat, it"(Dear Cabengo, eat)

"la moa, Poto?" (Here more, Poto?)

"Ya" (Yeah)

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" (I throw out the potato salad). 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.

It was all but unintelligible. The hospital decided to video-tape therapy sessions so linguists and speech pathologists could first slow it down, then analyze at leisure the relationship between obvious garbles like "pintu" (pencil), "nieps" (knife) and "ho-ahks" (orange) and real-life objects they apparently represented. Meier and Newport began laborious phonetic transcriptions to break the twins' dialogue down to traceable parts.

Romain and Speech Pathologist Anne Koeneke, who was assigned to Ginny, meanwhile began to use "play situations" to build up the twins' limited English. The girls could not easily arrange syllables into understandable words. They spewed out what English words they had with a machine gunlike rapidity. Given modeling clay (which they pretended was potato salad), kitchen implements, dolls and dollhouses, the twins would play and the speech pathologists would ask questions. Where should the doll go? "Inhouse," Gracie might answer. "Oh, in the house," Romain would reply slowly. Single words were expanded to phrases, phrases to sentences. Romain and Koeneke never directly corrected the twins. The girls seemed astonishingly innocent of the simplest childhood pleasures. They were totally baffled by a picture of a boy climbing a tree. The pathologists remember they provoked "exciting" language by taking the two outside to demonstrate tree climbing. After more than 100 hours of play were videotaped, Romain and Koeneke learned the girls' private language. But when the speech pathologists used it, Ginny and Gracie refused to answer. "They'd appear not to understand," recalls Koeneke, "or they'd just laugh."

Perhaps the girls have need to keep their secret world. Born in 1970 in Columbus, Ga., to Accountant Tom Kennedy, now 47, and Christine Kennedy, now 37, a German-born bookkeeper he met in a Munich dance hall during the Fasching festival, Gracie and Ginny suffered violent convulsions days after birth. Tests showed no brain damage, but the Kennedys claim that a Georgia neurosurgeon said it would be five years before the girls could be judged normal or retarded. Kennedy, who later lost his accounting job and moved the family to San Diego in hopes of selling real estate, was inclined to take the neurosurgeon literally. "A man of his standing," says Kennedy, "knows what he's talking about."

After moving to California, Ginny and Gracie were left to themselves or entrusted to then-- maternal grandmother, Paula Kunert, 76, a stern disciplinarian who spoke no English. They became frightened of strangers and dogs and stayed inside day after day, playing by themselves while then" parents slept or sought work. The parents did notice something they considered "childish gibberish." Playing in the corner, Gracie, the dominant twin, would hold up an object and seem to give it a name. Ginny would respond. High-speed dialogue followed. "They could say simple words," Tom Kennedy remembers, "mostly like Indians would talk in the movies."

Whether it was developed from loneliness or as a rebellious game or was simply a neurological accident, the twins' private communication has turned out to be something less than a true invented language. Linguists Meier and Newport now call Gracie and Ginny's speech "deformed English." What had seemed to be a vocabulary of hundreds of new words, when slowed down and analyzed on tape recordings proved to be about 50 complex mispronounced words and phrases jammed together and said at high speed. There was also "substantial variation" every time the twins talked. Phonetic transcripts initially brought run-together phrases like "pink-telephone" and "let's-go-marketing" to the surface, and they finally traced most of Ginny and Gracie's speech to English and minor German influences. One initial mystery, "toolaymeia" (for spaghetti), turned out to be a corruption of o sole mio, the family way of referring to Italian pasta. A scattering of words like "nunukid," "pulana" and "padeng" (possibly pudding) still remain perplexing.

But if the dominant linguistic view is that a private communication must be mostly original to be called a "language," anything spoken fluently is considered language or a "linguistic exercise." Clinic Chairman Hagen is convinced that the Kennedy case suggests there is a large psychological input in language development. Says Hagen: "They were in a somewhat sensory-deprived environment, but they didn't stop at a signal system. To me their private language represents strong evidence that man has a basic drive to communicate beyond minimal needs. Language evolves to do just that."

Gracie and Ginny now attend separate severe language disorder classes in the San Diego public school system. Put in different schools so they will not fall back to their private communication, they speak jerky, passable English. But they are woefully behind in social and emotional development. "I keep reading that they are so normal now," says Catherine Pope, Ginny's instructor at Ross Elementary School. "It simply isn't true." Gracie can repeat a sentence "imbedded" with a clause and add numbers up to a total of five, sometimes higher. Both girls have motor-coordination problems. One of Ginny's teachers discovered that she lacks what Jean Piaget defines as "object permanence," the developmental stage in which a normal child, at about age two, learns to retain images he or she does not see. But for Ginny, out of sight is out of mind. Says Catherine Pope: "The other talk still comes through. I suspect she and Gracie still do it behind closed doors." The twins now register IQ scores of 80 (up from 50) and have mastered simple reading and mathematical skills. The question of whether their remarkable private communication might hide a superior intelligence short-circuited by emotional problems is still unanswered.

In a sparkling tract home in San Diego's east end, rented partly with story-rights money, the twins settle down at the kitchen table after school for a rapid-fire game of clipping magazine pages and scribbling. "Can-I-haf-pen?" Gracie asks a visitor. "Inna gonna write-on da walls," she hastily assures her parents, who are in the living room. The visitor asks if she remembers the old language. "Yes," Ginny replies quickly. "No, you don't!" interrupts Tom Kennedy from the front-room couch. "I don't know why you are lying about that!" Ginny reaches playfully for Gracie's pen. "Keep-you-hands-off-me," laughs Gracie. Tom Kennedy speaks again. "You live in a society, you've got to speak the language," he says. "They don't want to be associated as dummies now." Ginny turns to her visitor after glancing conspiratorially at her parents. "O.K.," she says quickly, "I'11-talk-about-it-if-you ..." She holds a silencing finger to her mouth: "Shhhh!" She breaks into tinkling girlish laughter and goes back to scribbling in her magazine.

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