3V0769.03 Reading Hop on Pop (3/1/80)

Peggy sat reading in the middle of the study floor. Was Gretchen sitting
with her ? I can’t recall., but I know she was least in the room. Peggy
turned the first page, pointed at the picture and said, “Up // Pup.”
(This is the large letter text of the page.) On other pages, she “read”
other names and words, singly and in multi-word phrases: Song, Black;
All, Tall; No, Pat. She also produced her own interpretations. Where
three dogs fell out of a tub into the water, she noted, “Dog wet //
Soggy.” Peggy passed by the picture of three fish in a tree. I asked her
“What do you think of that fish in the tree?” She replied, “How bees ?”

The significance of this observation is that Peggy is obviously relating
uttered words and phrases to the specific pictures of her book “Hop on
Pop.” Some of this relating is associational, e.g. the name “Black” with
the specific character (she doesn’t know well color names). The role
of semantics is clearly evident in her interpretation of the “wet dogs”
picture. It is also probably implicated in her ‘reading’ of “No, Pat” and
“Up // Pup.” This applies even more strongly to her reply “How bees?”
(An idiosyncratic production instead of “How can that be?”)

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