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?
