Education: 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.