Interview with John W. Oller Jr., Ph.D., Hawthorne Regents Professor
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Beck: Good morning John. Thanks for your time today.Oller:Hi Doug. Nice to speak with you again.Beck: John if you don't mind, would you briefly reviewing your education and tell me about your current position?Oller:My doctorate is from the University of Rochester in New York. I completed it in 1969,
Beck: Good morning John. Thanks for your time today.Oller:Hi Doug. Nice to speak with you again.
Beck: John if you don't mind, would you briefly reviewing your education and tell me about your current position?
Oller:My doctorate is from the University of Rochester in New York. I completed it in 1969, and my primary area was General Linguistics. Most of my research has been in theoretical and experimental research in linguistics as it applies to communication disorders, and I've been working quite a lot on topics relating to autism. My co-authors Stephen D. Oller and Linda C. Badon hold PhDs from UL Lafayette and Louisiana State University repectively in 2005 and 1993, and Dr. Badon has the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech Language Pathology and 30 years of experience as a clinician. We are all deeply interested in the connections between theory and practice.
Beck: Thanks John. I guess I should start is by saying that at the end of this interview is a link which will take the reader to an extraordinary "preview" article which we published in March, 2006. I liked the preview article quite a bit and it certainly did pique my interest in the book. However, as that article goes into some detail regarding the content, I thought we'd speak here about some of the other aspects.
For example, the book comes with two fabulous DVDs, one for students and another for teachers. Can you tell us about them?
Oller:Let's take the student DVD first. It contains movies showing critical results of recent research, verifying theoretical predictions in the book, and showing some new technologies as well. It also contains hyperlinks to key websites and a completely searchable version of the expanded table of contents which includes chapter summaries, hyperlinks to websites, all of the video and audio files, figures, glossary, references, and a thorough electronically searchable index from the printed text. The teacher DVD contains all the material from the student DVD and more. In addition there are PowerPoint presentations for each chapter that the instructor can use or edit however may be desired, 600 pre-tested multiple choice questions covering the whole book from start to finish, and a complete analysis of those test items. Everyone of the test items is cross-referenced to one or more pages in the textbook where that particular question is answered. These are also arranged in chronological order beginning with the material in Chapter 1 and proceding right through to Chapter 12. Students can play the audio and video files to see and hear real time demonstrations of some of the remarkable theoretical predictions and advances that are published for the first time in the Milestones book. For example, they see the baby smile in the womb, a nine month old reading, and real time deterioration of a live nerve cell owing to mercury poisoning.
Beck: Right, I agree with all of that, and I am very excited about the new format. The fact that someone can buy the book and read it is fine, but then being able to see and hear the illustrations on the DVDs, makes the Milestones book an incredible learning opportunity.
Oller:Thanks Doug.
Beck: John, one of the videos I viewed was the one regarding mercury dental fillings. Can you tell me a little about how that came to be on the DVDs?
Oller:That video relates to how speech and language develop over time. As you know, we cover the whole story of the life span chronologically from fetal development to mortality. Although we concentrate on normal development, things can go wrong at any point along the way. In fact, our main purpose is to enable students to understand disorders on the basis of normal milestones. For this reason, it is natural to ask why it is that with advancing age that the degenerative conditions seen in Alzheimer's, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, etc., for instance, are increasingly common. We wanted to know why genetically linked neurological disorders especially, along with those on the autism spectrum, seem to be increasingly common. We don't think the changes that have been taking place are uncaused. Among the suspected culprits are toxins, such as mercury. The research is clear that if mercury is not the primary cause of some of these conditions, it certainly exacerbates all of them along with other neurodegenerative conditions and disorders As a result, we pursued the mercury issue clear back to the womb. Key sources in recent decades have included vaccines and dental amalgam (silver fillings). The research shows that mercury poisoning causes symptoms that look a lot like those of the autism spectrum disorders. From the genetic perspective it seems that the susceptibilities to damage from certain toxins provide probable links between neurodegenerative disorders and those on the autism spectrum.
Beck: I agree. I think there's an excellent chance the two traditionally distinct classes of disorders are related. John, please define "autism spectrum disorders."
Oller:The definitions vary, but at the center of the autism spectrum is the severe kind of autism that is characterized by impaired language acquisition and social relations often accompanied by stereotyped behaviors referred to as "hand-flapping." In the most severe cases, the individual never learns to recognize mom or anyone else or to use any language.
Beck: Is the rate of autistim spectrum disorders on the rise?
Oller:We believe that it is. Certainly, the rate of diagnosis in 2006 is many times greater than it was a few decades ago, and the rate of increase continued to grow both before and after the criteria for diagnosis were broadened in 1994. It now represents the fastest growing class of communication disorders.
Beck: And you believe that mercury poisoning may be partly to blame?
Oller:The research from Fritz Lorscheider and colleagues shows that minute quantities of mercury, less than one part per million, can destroy and strip away the vital protein, tubulin, from nerve fibrils. Especially in cases where the genetic inheritance of the child does not enable the excretion of mercury, because it is exceedingly neurotoxic, it can damage nerves especially, as well as, vital organs. Over the long haul, many individuals whose bodies are fairly efficient at dumping the mercury, will still be damaged by mercury poisoning. It is very bad for everyone, but worse for those who cannot excrete it efficiently. The normal development of nerve fibrils is of course critical to the development of normal sensation, movement, and cognition. The research does not yet justify the claim that mercury is the sole cause of any particular neurodegenerative conditions other than acute mercury toxicity itself. It causes that in many cases. With respect to other long-term neurogenic conditions there is sufficient research on hand to say without risk of controversy that mercury makes neurodegenerative conditions worse than they would be without it. There is no doubt that mercury causes many of the symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders and that mercury toxicity makes neurodegenerative conditions worse.
Beck: Am I correct that if you are one of the people more susceptible to neuro-genetic diseases and disorders, there could be a synergistic impact from mercury exposure, and that, combined with your own genetic predisposition, might allow the manifestation of these disorders to come forward?
Oller:That seems to be the best hypothesis on the market. It is certainly the key question that researchers, especially biologists and medical practitioners are exploring. Harmful mercury exposure is measured in parts per billion by various government agencies that do not agree on just how much it takes to cause serious harm. What we do know for certain, however, is that exposure in parts per million is lethal, and much smaller quantities, can cause very significant damage and are certainly implicated in the abnormalities mentioned earlier.
Beck: I know we could talk about this for hours, but let me move on to a totally different topic addressed in the book. It seems that although we typically look for the first step at about 12 months of age, if the child is supported, it appears that babies can actually take their first step at birth?
Oller:The research supports this surprising conclusion. We have a picture of a neonate taking steps with the assistance of a doctor. In fact, we have a video from Dr. Stuart Campbell at Create Health Clinic in London showing that a fetus can make stepping movements in the womb as early as the end of the first trimester. That remarkable video is based on a new technology that allows us to actually see the baby in the womb. We can see the baby smile, and the details are sufficiently clear to say that it is the same kind of smile we see in adults. Another issue dealt with on the DVDs has to do with the age of reading readiness. Our theory of abstraction predicts and shows why a baby should be able to read by, or a little before, the first receptive vocabulary appears in the child's repertoire. This happens a little after the onset of canonical babbling. Thanks to Dr. Robert Titzer, we have video showing a 9 month old baby reading words, and not just a few of them. Students can see several normal babies reading on the DVD by about 24 to 36 months. As soon as the baby can connect abstract words with events involving concrete objects, the baby can begin to learn to read. We call this process pragmatic mapping.
Beck: And that's where the idea of "Einstein's Gulf" comes into play, right?
Oller:Right. Einstein argued that there is vast difference, a logically uncrossable gulf, between the world of hard things and events and the realm of words and abstract ideas. In the Milestones book we illustrate Einstein's Gulf in the difference between a shoe, and the word "shoe." The "gulf" is the logical difference between the thing and the abstract symbol. Einstein's Gulf is the distance or the gap that separates sensory impressions of material things from abstract ideas, concepts, and meanings.
Beck: On the video, Dr. Titzer holds up a card containing the word "foot" and little 9 month old Aleka demonstrates that she knows the meaning of that word by grabbing her foot and moving it around. She seems to have learned that the printed word "foot" refers to her own foot. It appears from this and other demonstrations on the video that the child can connect printed words with meanings much sooner than we have expected.
Oller:In fact, there are quite a few examples on the DVD, thanks to Dr. Titzer's work, showing children reading at ages ranging from 9 months upward.
Beck: So in other words, most children can probably learn to read and write even before kindergarten and first grade?
Oller:That's what the evidence shows. We invite readers to have a look for themselves.
Beck:
John, this has really been fascinating. I appreciate your time and have totally enjoyed reading the book.
Oller:Thanks Doug.
TO view the complete preview article....
A Preview of Milestones: Normal Speech and Language Across the Lifespan, San Diego: Plural Publishing 2006 John W. Oller, Jr., Ph.D., Stephen D. Oller, Ph.D., & Linda C. Badon, CCC-SLP, Ph.D
Book Information:
Milestones: Normal Speech and Language Development Across the Life Span
John W. Oller Ph.D
Stephen D. Oller Ph.D.
Linda C. Badon Ph.D. CCC-SLP
Plural Publishing Inc
San Diego, Oxford, Brisbane
ISBN 1-59756-036-7
www.pluralpublishing.com
www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~jxo1721/index.html/