ELEANOR Grace is now almost two. What a vocabulary! shoe, book, teetee (TV), maoo (cat), wash, hann (hand), noch (snow), mommy, daddy, no, yesh, mann (c'mon), joots (juice), baoo (bottle), and as marketers say, much much more (including "please" (very new) and "thank you" (fairly instinctive)). No one ever advised me that the process works this way:
- Daughter develops own vocabulary / syntax / word order, and develops her own way of pronunciation. (A friend describes it as "Dutch"). She understands herself perfectly, but may be dimly aware that Mommy and Daddy aren't "from the same country".
- When individual words/phrases are spoken, parent may or may not know what they refer to.
- After a time, through context, parent learns to "translate", and provides linguistic/contextual feedback. Daughter confirms understanding with very cute smile and repetition of the formerly incomprehensible utterance. This completes the loop for that expression, and over time pronunciation can improve as the loop is reinforced.
This process became apparent to me with Eleanor’s utterance "mann", which I understood to mean "c'mon". I hadn't realized how often I used this contraction with her. However, "mann" can also mean "mine". So even for 22-month-old US English, context matters.
By the way, who knows what a mondegreen is?
2 comments:
When Cole was about Eleanor's age, he would say, "Up-a-bye, up-a-bye" when the logo of a local credit union would appear on the TV screen. For a long time, his dad and I thought he was saying, "Butterfly," because the logo might have resembled a butterfly. To encourage him, we'd enthusiastically repeat, "Yes, butterfly! Butterfly!"
About a year or so later when Cole and I were driving through town, we saw the credit union logo on a big sign. Cole saw the sign, and with speaking skills that were much more developed, he said quite clearly, "Brought to you by, mommy! That's brought to you by!" That's when I realized that our child was never saying, "Butterfly" at all. At 20-plus months of age, he was pointing out that the credit union was a sponsor of the local TV news broadcast. And all that time we thought we were reinforcing his speech ...!
LOL!
Well, it strikes me that what Cole thought was that the logo literally means "brought to you by"! So apparently to Cole, the credit union sponsors all TV shows, but sometimes doesn't show the symbol for it!!
Kids think the darndest things . . .
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