By David John Oates
The study of Reverse Speech has yielded many amazing discoveries about the nature of the unconscious mind and who we are as people. I’ll be detailing many of these discoveries in future articles but in this article I want to look at the Reverse Speech of children.
I wrote my first theory about the dual fold nature of language in April 1987 and at the time some of my questions were, “When does Reverse Speech begin?” “Are we born with it or is it a learned function like forward speech?” Then, as fate would have it, I became the proud father of twin girls in July 1987, and I had a new research project on my hand. From the moment they came home from hospital I began to tape them for several hours a week. I analysed the tapes forwards and backwards looking for discernable words. I found nothing at first despite many hours of tireless work. Then, when they were 4 months of age, I found my very first speech reversal.
We were playing a game of trivial pursuits and the twins were crying in their basinets. We ignored their cries for a few minutes but one cry in particular got our attention and their mother went to check on them. When I later analysed the tape backwards a clear reversal was heard on that precise baby cry. It said, in reverse, “Mummy, mummy.” A week or so later I heard another clear word backwards that said “Hullo.” As the twins grew older backward words were heard more frequently. Words like “hungry”, “nappy” and “help”.
At seven months of age, I heard my first 2 word sentence backwards on one of my twins. I was chasing her around the room with the tape recorder when she stopped and reached out for the recorder. Forwards she made sounds that sounded like, “Eee ar gaga.” When I later analysed this in reverse it said, “Whats that.” By the time they were one year of age, they were saying 3 and 4 word sentences in reverse, all this before they were speaking forwards. On one occasion, at 13 months of age, my daughter was trying to pick up a cup in the bathtub. She couldn’t pick it up so she reached to me for help muttering baby sounds. When those precise sounds were played backwards they said, “David, help me.”
A month later, at 14 months of age, we had just moved the twins from one room to another and a reversal was heard on one of my daughters that said “I now come here.”
By the time my daughters started talking forwards they were already saying complex sentences in reverse. One time my daughter said forwards “David,”. This reversed to say “Is my dad.” An amusing example sent to me by a reverse speech student has his son saying forwards, “Dirty diaper.” Backwards he says, “Help me out.”
The applications of this find are exciting. It essentially means that we can get in contact with the young child’s mind a lot earlier than previously thought. This has wide spread applications in working with children of many ages.
I was introduced to another exciting application a few years ago when I was approached by the mother of a 13 year old girl who had been retarded and nonverbal since birth. She sent me a 30 minute tape of her child’s seemingly meaningless sounds to analyse and amazingly I found several clear reversed statements in that tape, including one that said, “Mummy, love you.” Speech reversals have also been found on the sounds made by deaf children.
As a result of these very significant finds I have proposed a new theory of language. This theory essentially states that the process of spoken communication in children begins backwards before it does forwards. From as early as four months of age children are pronouncing simple words backwards. Then, as they begin to learn forward speech, these two modes of speech, forwards and backwards, combine to form into one overall dual communication process.
Furthermore, I have discovered that many of our children’s learned behaviour are coming unconsciously from their parents speech reversals. Because reverse speech is a communication process, children are constantly hearing the speech reversals of their parents and taking in those characteristics. At deeper levels of reverse speech these codes of behaviour are stored in metaphor and archetype which carry with them the energy of the behaviour. As the children hear the reversed metaphors of the parents, the behaviour also becomes a part of them. Thus children will appear to repeat parental patterns unless change is created in either the parents, or the children, at the unconscious level.
To learn more about reverse speech or to hear any of the reversals quoted in this article go to the reverse speech website at http://www.reversespeech.com or in Australia call toll free on 1800 720029. International phone 61 8 8382-4372 or email backwards@reversespeech.com