My brother is always asking me how many words she says, and I say "it depends, either lots or else none, depending on how you count." She uses "da" for me, for "duck," for "that," and sometimes just kind of randomly. "Mama" can similarly mean a lot of things, and as discussed earlier "ah ah" could be "I'm a monkey, oooh oooh oooh aaaah aaah aaah" or else "I need the potty!" She's got "cheh" or "chsssta" for "Chester" and "Ca!" for cat (she also pointed out a big photo of a cat at Ikea - she was so excited for the cat photo that I swear she pronounced the capital C and the !).
These kinds of "coincidences" happen all the time. Surely at least a few of them must be random (me finding an interpretation for a random pronouncement by her), but when you're around her long enough it's clear that she really is trying to talk, and that she understands a huge number of words even if she can't say them. If anyone has any idea how large the vocabulary of a 14 month old is I'd love to hear it. I think it must be in the hundreds of words. Here are a few examples of requests I can remember making in the last day or two for which she did what I had asked her to do:
"Bring me your boots"
"Point to your head/feet/nose/mouth" / "wo ist dein Kopf/Nase?"
"Take this to Mommy"
"Go find Mommy"
"Take this book back to the shelf and bring me a new one"
"Are you a monkey/sheep/cat/dog/cow?" (Animal noises are back, yeah!)
"Kick the ball"
"Stomp"
I'm really looking forward to Clara beginning to talk. I can't wait to hear what's on her mind!
We went to the zoo yesterday and found a hidden passage in the bird house that leads into a huge "rainforest" room where the birds can and will walk right up to you. Here's a crummy camera phone picture:
I go to the bird house with Clara almost every time we go to the zoo, so I was really shocked to find this exciting new area! I wonder if the entrance is hidden on purpose to keep the traffic down, or if it's just poorly laid out? The signage at the zoo is pretty bad in general.
2 comments:
I'm sure Clara's vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, as you say; at least, her passive vocabulary (the bits she can understand but doesn't say) must be, but of course it's really difficult to measure that!
After reading this post I looked back at some notes I made about my niece, Rosa María, when she was just slightly older than this (17 months). At that time, she was to some extent at least passively bilingual in English and Spanish (though she has actually always lived in an English-speaking environment, my sister is fluent in Spanish and often used to speak it to her as a baby); now she's 7, and goes, or at least used to go, to Spanish Club at school, so she still speaks some of the language.
At 17m, I recorded and noted about two dozen words for RM (that she could say). Most could be identified as coming from English, though some didn't; many food-words seemed to come from Spanish, including her first ever word, teta ('baby bottle'; originally 'teat'), which she used to ask for a bottle of warm milk; she used to have one three times a day, morning, noon and night. Later, other topics dealing with 'basic life' also seemed to have more Spanish vocab, and she of course seemed to assume that all adults spoke Spanish (or maybe it was just all women): so she was well able to answer the question ¿Dónde están tus pantalones? 'Where are your trousers?', at least by pointing, and she also assumed that my Mum would understand when she said ¡Pantalones en mis pies! 'Trousers on my feet!', while getting dressed, pointing at her trousers in a pile around her feet. As you say, though, and as I also put in my notes at the time, it was quite clear that she understood much more than she could say, or chose to say.
It's not unusual if Clara seems to use the same sound or sequence of sounds with more than one meaning. All languages (I think it's true to say) have synonyms, of course. I see in my notes about Rosa María that, at 17m, she used a sound like door without the r to mean 'door', 'doll' and 'dog'. We got these examples in various conversations, where the meaning was clear each time from the context. Sometimes, these synonyms seemed just to be based on ease or difficulty of saying some particular sequence of sounds, and changed over time.
Did you enjoy the article about German-English bilinguals that I sent you yesterday?
Have you considered / talked about recording Clara's speech (for longer periods than are in the videos, though they're great to have too)? I know that becoming a subject is an ever-present hazard for any child of a linguist, and one you may not wish to expose yours to; also, recording the speech of a child who moves around all the time, as they do, is much easier said than done. There really isn't any good, convenient way to do it, despite years of language-acquisition research (none of which I know about). On the other hand, you'd love having the recordings in years to come, and they would be great study-materials if you chose to use them or make them available that way, particularly because Clara is bilingual. My sister now listens to CDs of Rosa María (that I made when she was 1) as if they were music. But there are good arguments on either side, so it's up to you.
How fun!
just be careful when you attempt to run psycholinguistic experiments on her: "At 18 months, Dr. Linebarger’s daughter Callie was so blasé about research that she interrupted a study and said, “No questions, Mama,” Dr. Linebarger recalled. “Later, when we were walking to get pizza and she was riding on my husband’s shoulders,” she said, “I tried to slip the questions in casually and she just looked at me with a smirk.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/scienc/18kids.html
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