Pulling out the stops

Tonight I was waiting in the car with Baby V and I decided to do a little experiment. I'm sure someday she will be really mad at me for all this, but until then I'll take my chances.

It was just a harmless little phonetics experiment. I decided to test the consonant sounds we use use in English, starting at the front of the mouth and moving back. So first I said, "Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh." This is the voiced bilabial stop, made by pressing the lips together.

The perfect little mimic said, "Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh."

I decided to continue with the stop consonants: "Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh."

V repeated, "Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh." (This is the voiced alveolar stop; the tip of the tongue presses against the alveolar ridge).

The same pattern continued for the velar stop, "Guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh."

I then went through all of the voiceless stops, which were successful, and also the nasals, "muh-muh-muh" and "nuh-nuh-nuh." So far, this was all a raging success; she repeated the sounds without any delay and, in fact, without even having to think about how to do it. The right sounds came out completely naturally.

Until I got to the labiodentals, that is. Her "fuh-fuh-fuh" came out sounding more like her "puh-puh-puh." The same was also true for "vuh-vuh-vuh"--her was more of a "buh-buh-buh."

When I said the "suh-suh-suh," sound, she said it as one continuous hiss: "Sssssssss." But when I said, "Zuh-zuh-zuh-zuh-zuh," she pretty much said it perfectly.

I know better than to test her liquids and glides at this point (the l, w, and y sounds). The same is true for her vowels. She does pretty wells with most vowels, but they are still kind of all over the place. For example, her beep still comes out more like bap. Maybe it's safe to say she has the lower vowels, but not the high vowels? I feel another test coming on!

Bear with me, poor little kid ...

Duck!

I am not kidding, the words are flying out of this kid's mouth! From the second she wakes up, until well after she goes down in her crib at night, it's all pointing and calling everything by name that she knows. "Lampa." "Ljus." "Cava" (that's our dog). "Mamma." "Star." "Baby." "Banana." "Cheese." "Bear." "Nose." "Diaper." "Egg." "Ball." "Book." "Cookie." "Toes." "Eyes." And then it starts all over again.

People who have studied language/linguistics have learned this from the start, but here I am seeing it in action, loud and clear, and right under my nose as my child learns to speak: there is an innate need for humans to communicate. It is as important to her as sleeping or eating. We are, after all, social creatures (yes, I know, some more than others, but that's a different story).

It's feeling more and more like V and I are having actual conversations. This could just mean that it's time for me to go back to work, when I start thinking that I am having conversation with a one-year-old (!), but no--give me some credit. She says these words that she knows, then she turns to me for comment or confirmation. It's incredible: at the age of one year, she is already picking up conversation patterns (what linguists call "turn taking"). It blows me away.

Here is something new as of yesterday: She has learned to say the second syllable of Cava's name. Just one day ago, she called the dog "Caw." Now she says, one hundred percent of the time, "Cava." Well, actually, she says something more like "Caba." That makes sense, doesn't it? Isn't the labiodental sound v hard to make when she doesn't have her front teeth yet? Or am I making this up? I am not exactly sure about the order of acquisition of phonemes. Another thing I need to look up.

At any rate, the enunciation is getting clearer and clearer. Baby is another word that now has two distinct syllables. A week ago, she said it more like the French word, bébé.

Her language is changing so fast at this point, I feel like I am having a hard time keeping up. The words are flying out of her mouth, and if I duck, I'm going to miss something.

Two is company

We are now reaching a stage where I think it is accurate to begin referring to V as "bilingual." Let's keep in mind, of course, that she is only 14 months old, so it's not like she is participating in long conversations or reading literature in either Swedish or English. Even as her mother, I must be modest in these claims. I feel I can start to call her bilingual at this point for a couple of reasons. First, she seems to have about as many words in Swedish as in English. Second, and more importantly, she seems to have grasped the fact that, in some cases, she has two words for the same concept. The best examples so far are bollen/the ball, anka/duck, and hunden/the dog.

That is not to say that she separates these out 100 percent of the time for all of her "people." Today, for example, she pointed to a duck and told me "anka." Later, she pointed to a duck (the girl has a lot of ducks!) and said to her pappa, "Duck, duck." Then she seemed to realize, "Wait, this is Pappa," and she switched to "anka, anka." Needless to say, he was impressed.

A new trick is the repetition of animal noises. You know, the classic, "What does the X say?" Interesting here is that these are a mixed bag. It must be too much for her to absorb that in Swedish the pig says "nöff, nöff," but in English it says "oink, oink." So V just has one animal sound per animal, and these noises are a mixture of English and Swedish. The pig, for example, speaks Swedish in V's world. The chicken, however, is strictly English speaking (bock, bock, bock, bock, bock). The dog/hund works out OK, because "woof, woof," works in both languages. At least the kid gets some breaks!

New words in the past week or so include star (she points at our Christmas stars), pretty, car, and egg. This is ägg in Swedish, which is pronounced the same as the English word, so it doesn't count in the "bilingual" list mentioned above.

Words that she got only part of the time before and has now mastered include bye-bye (she nows understands in what situations to use it, which is a big step) and, it seems, no.

The word egg gets applied to a lot of concepts. Anything that has an oval shape gets called egg. Anything that has a round or circular shape (even the polka dots on her shirts, for example) gets called "ball." This distinction is quite interesting; apparently on some level she recognizes different shapes.*

The Finnish is still hard to assess. It seems she has at least a couple of words, but she doesn't use them when she is with us (of course). She will be spending more time with her babysitter and Finnish-speaking friends as of January, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

*This just happened (I am writing this addendum the next day): V just noticed a little star shape on the car she got for Christmas, and she pointed and said, "Star." So definitely she recognizes shapes. I guess this is no different, though, from recognizing, say, a dog, a baby, or a banana. Right?

Det är amazing

The past few weeks have been amazing in many ways, not limited to linguistic development, but certainly the linguistic developments have been a high point (let's hear it again for dorky linguist parents!).

First, a report on a big moment for V and her pappa. Have I mentioned that V likes pictures and books? She could easily spend as many hours a day poring over books as we would let her. One of her favorite books has pictures of her with people she knows and loves. She was looking at this book with her pappa, and he asked her (in Swedish, of course), "Where's mamma?" V pointed, and answered, plain as day, "Där är mamma!" This gorgeous little utterance was her first complete sentence in Swedish, and Pete nearly jumped out of his chair for joy. I have to say I was quite impressed, as well.

Her Swedish continues to develop, but in a different direction than her English. As I have mentioned before, this seems to be bound up with the personal relationships; in other words, the output depends on who says what to her. One of the things she does with her dad is to look at pictures of animals. At this point, she knows how to respond to most of the "What does the ---- say?" questions, but mostly in Swedish. The only animal names she knows in English so far are cat and dog, and she can respond with what they say. In Swedish she knows cow, pig, horse, etc.

This is interesting: before, I wrote that she seems to have only one word per concept, without overlap. In other words, she doesn't really seem to have two languages yet, just language. However, we have now seen our first element of overlap, and it is with her favorite thing of all: the dog. She knows the word hund in Swedish, and she knows the word dog in English. When her pappa asks, "Vad säger hunden?" she answers "woof." When I ask, "What does the dog say?" she also answers "woof." This is the very first example we have of her identifying the same concept in two languages, and this is EXCITING. Let the bilingualism begin!

Her semantic field is changing, too. I wrote sometime before that, for example, all food was "bread" to her. That has changed as of a couple of weeks ago. Now, just bread is bread. If she doesn't know the word for some kind of food she wants, she might still call it "bread." Like her nighttime bottle, for instance. However, she calls a banana "banana" and cheese "cheese." She also says "apple" (she says it and certain other two-syllable words in a really cute way: she emphasizes the second syllable and give it a rising pitch, so it comes out like "app-ELL?"). This is where it gets interesting: it seems to be the case that any round fruit is, in her mind, an apple. If she sees an orange, a mango, a kiwi--whatever--she points and says, "apple." The same thing still goes for dogs: any animal with four legs that she doesn't have another name for (zebra, horse, etc.) is a dog.

There is a lot of mimicking going on, no matter what language or sounds she hears. So, for example, if her German or Finnish friends are around, she mimicks "nein, nein, nein," or "voi, voi, voi, voi, voi," clearly because she likes the sound of it, not because she knows what it means. A few days ago, a friend of ours said, "Voi, voi, voi, voi, voi," in Finnish, which means something like "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," and Vera just loved it. She kept saying this "voi, voi" thing at all the right moments in the subsequent conversation, and the laughter she elicited every time absolutely thrilled her. It's amazing how fast they learn through such positive feedback.

I have been pleased with her recent acquisition of the word more. I believe this is the first word she has used that doesn't fit into a noun or verb category. She really gets this word, too. Another exciting milestone for the linguist mom.

Is there any evidence that she is trilingual at this point? Not much, I'd say. She seems to know a few words in Finnish, but at this point they are just mixed in with her language (remember, for the most part she doesn't seem to have languages--with a plural--yet). I might be making this up, but I think she seems genuinely confused when we enter into a Finnish speaking situation, and especially when she hears me speaking Finnish. Actually, she probably is old enough to get the difference, now that I think about it. When her Finnish grandmother is around, for example, V says the words she knows in Swedish and English and isn't responsive to the Finnish her grandmother says. The other day when I took her to her little music class, she seemed confused as to what was happening in a way I hadn't noticed during previous classes. I am sure this is because her comprehension, especially in English, is very high already. For example, if I tell her to bring me her shoes, socks, her toothbrush, or a book, she readily does as requested. What I am getting at is that it must be confusing for her when we enter into a situation where she suddenly can't understand anything (like when we are with Finnish speakers). I'll be watching closely for signs that she is beginning to realize that these are different languages.

A word about words

At this point--and I have a feeling this could be the case for some time--V only has one term for each individual concept. In other words, a candle is always ljus, and dog is always dog (not hund, like in Swedish), etc. I can't think of any exceptions to this. So the languages are definitely not sorted out yet: she doesn't know both the Swedish and the English word for all of the things in her universe.

Still, her universe is expanding! She takes delight in stringing all of the words she knows together. Yesterday morning, for example, she was laying in her bed saying, "Mamma bear, baby bear ..." I don't think she knows that that means, necessarily, she is just playing with language.

She continues to use an awful lot of nonverbal communication, as well. It's mostly pointing at this stage, which is, of course, a very effective tool. She points at the food she wants, she points at her bottle when she wants to go lay down, she points or lifts her hands when she wants me to carry her. The cuddling and patting continues, as well. If she likes someone, she reaches over to pat their arm. During the past few days, she has become more attached to her nighttime bear. When she sees it, she hugs it to her chest and says, "Oooooh, bear."

Her pronunciation of bear is "baw." This is typical, of course, and could continue until she is even 5 or so. Other than the r sound, I honestly have to say that I think the rest of the English phonemes are more or less there. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that she didn't seem to have the n sound; she pronounced it perfectly in all word positions only a couple of days later. She has offered perfect renditions of her sister's name, which starts with n.

Fireworks

V's speech has left me speechless several times during the last few days. She constantly surprises me with what she has stored, what she can mimic, and how adept she is at using what she knows to get her point across. It's like an explosion of skills.

Here is a good example of using what she knows to get her point across: when she wants to go outside, she says "woof." It's not because she hears a dog or sees a picture of a dog, but because she knows, of course, that when we go out we see dogs. She accompanies the little woofs by pointing out the window, for extra measure. Here is another example: yesterday she went to the front door and repeated "baby, baby" and her little friend's name. She was also pointing up. I got the message loud and clear: she was bored with me and wanted to play with her baby friend who lives upstairs. When I grabbed her and carried her out the door, she laughed with delight, no doubt at least in part because she had succeeded in communicating--but mostly because she was going to play.

V is learning when the same word applies across concepts. For a long time, the only "nose" was her mamma's, or maybe pappa's (but of course his nose is a näsa). A couple of days ago she had her rubber ducky, which, oddly, is one of her favorite things in the world, and she pointed to the little beak and said, "nose." Since, she has done the same thing to her teddy bears.

It seems to be the case that, officially, V has learned her first word in Finnish. We were listening to her repeat a word that sounded close to mamma, but not quite. This didn't make sense, since mamma is one of her most distinctly articulated words. We realized that she was saying mennään, which means "let's go" in Finnish. I asked V's babysitter, and she verified: yes, V has learned that word from her time with the babysitter and the other kids.

New words at this point include brush (brushing her teeth is now part of the nightly ritual), uh-oh (not exactly new; she mimicked it before but now knows what it means), eyes, mouth, yes, no, and Swedish nej.

Now a word about nonverbals. V expresses her love for something by patting and petting, and she often says, "Oooooh," to accompany her pats. Lucky creatures who receive this treatment include me, her pappa, our dog, her goodnight bear, her rubber ducky, and her friend from upstairs. I am not sure where she learned this behavior, although her favorite book for a long time has been Pat the Bunny. That might explain the patting, anyway.

More than just bread

I realized a couple of days ago that V now seems to realize that bread refers to a particular kind of food, not all food. She calls bread by name, that is, and she also has a couple of other food names at this point. Still, in a tight spot, meaning when she is hungry, she says in a really emphatic way, "Breeeeeead." That's her way of saying she is hungry. These kids are genius! They use the few words they know to communicate.

Speaking of which, she actually does use her few words almost constantly and with great delight. When we sit at the table, for example, or when we look at books, V supplies a constant narration of the things she sees--or, more accurately, the things she sees that she has a name for: lamppa, bread, banana, nose, etc.

I have to come clean now and admit that I am probably overselling her verbal skills (what--no way!!!). I can understand what she says because I am around her almost constantly. Her bread and her woof come out quite clearly, as well as mamma. At this point, however, she does not have a full command of consonants and definitely not her vowels. Actually, I think she has most of her consonants, save for the n, the liquids, and the labiodental fricatives (f, v). Her version of banana comes out as "bapa." In other words, the initial bilabial stop gets repeated. When she tries to say her sister's name, which starts with an n, it comes out with a d sound, so it sounds like she is saying "dada." In this case she has the place of articulation right, but not the manner of articulation. It's interesting to me that she has the m sound already but not the n.

Ladybug

Seriously, I am not making this up: today V mimicked when I pointed out a ladybug in her new book, and she said it perfectly. I was astonished. We are onto monosyllables!

I wrote a while back about how I thought she uttered what I thought might be a sentence, even though it was clearly not intentional on her part at this stage. She now says a nearly complete sentence on a routine basis: Want dat, which means, of course "I want that." The subject, the books say, will come much, much later. Personal pronouns are among the last of the grammatical elements that children master.

Here is a list of the words she uses regularly at this stage: ljus ('light' in Swedish), lamppa ('lamp' in Swedish), hej ('hello' in Swedish), baby, bye-bye, Daddy, Mamma, woof, nose, apple, duck, ball, banana, fish, bread, woof, dat ('that'), toes, and what seems to be kiss and book. Not a bad start!

Bring on the fricatives!

She's got fricatives*! V is mimicking all kinds of words and sounds now. It seems to be the big thing, in fact. In English she says toes, cheese, and other words I cannot seem to conjure up at the moment. Of course she doesn't have perfect pronunciation, but the fricatives are definitely there. In Swedish she says ljus 'light.'

I have noticed that the vowels seem quite hit and miss. Today, for example, we were looking at a book about what things make what sounds, and when I said "beep beep," her version was "bap bap."

Communication seems very important for her. She enjoys social situations. She says hej in Swedish now, which means hello, and she says bye bye in English. Of course she also waves hello and goodbye a lot.

*This is a term I realize might not be familiar for nonlinguistics (ie, normal people). I usually tell my introductory students that a fricative is any sound they can use to describe air coming out of a tire: ssss, zzzzz, ffffff, thhhhhh, etc.

V at 12 months

The words seem to be spilling out V at this point. She constantly surprises us. Not all of them seem to have semantic content for her, however; she is simply a very good mimic.

The bulk of her vocabulary still is in English: baby, banana, meow, pear ... and that's all I can think of at the moment that is new.

She continues to learn equivalent concepts in English and in Swedish. For example, if I say, "Where is Mamma's nose?" she points to my nose. If her dad says the same thing in Swedish, she successfully points out the right body part. And that's something! My nose is a much bigger target than her dad's.

I mentioned that V is a good mimic. This applies not only to words, but to "non-words" as well. I realized that she doesn't distinguish, for the most part, between a "word" (whatever that means; we linguists manage to complicate even what normal people would consider a common-sense concept like what a word is) and "nonsense." It is normal for a baby to experiment with the full capability of the human vocal apparatus, and then over time this robust repertoire is whittled down only to those sounds that are necessary to speak her native language(s). This is why, for example, an English speaker, like me, who hasn't learned to pronounce the French uvular "r" as a child may find it difficult to do so later in life. Or why Japanese people find it difficult to differentiate between "l" and "r" in English, etc. What amazes me is that, given the number of cool sounds humans are capable of making, it is usually a predictable set of them that tend to be used to make words in the vast majority of the world's languages. A comprehensive list of these sounds is represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Monkey talk

Yesterday V responded to her pappa's question in Swedish, "What does the dog say?" with a "woof." This was the first time we realized that she understood the question in Swedish as well as in English. I thought her daddy would weep with joy to hear that little "woof." It's amazing to see how much emotion is tied up with a native language.

We now have lots of evidence that she understands words in both English and Swedish. Of course there is no evidence as of yet that she realizes they are two different languages.

The other surprise yesterday came when V was eating a banana. I said to her, "You're a little monkey!" V said, "Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh." That's what a monkey says, of course--everybody knows that. Apparently she has learned the word monkey already, without me even noticing!

More than just a woof

Today V has officially graduated from "woof" to "dog." She says it very well! She LOVES dogs.

And here is one more exciting language-related thing from today: I asked V if she wanted to read books, and she turned to the bookshelf and pointed to her own stack of books. I had no idea she knew the word book.

If you're vavoom and you know it

Today's little experiment involved singing the "happy and you know it" song. I sang it in English, and I was surprised that V clapped her hands at the right time, because usually it is her dad who sings this song to her in Swedish (I am sure he appreciates me reporting about this :-)).

I started wondering if she really understood the words in English, so then I started singing random stuff like "If you're va-va-voom and you know it va-va-voom." Sure enough, V clapped her hands in all the right spots. This points to a couple of things: 1) music/intonation/rhythm trumps words at this point 2) wow, we must actually be able to more or less carry a tune!

Tick tock

Today V's babysitter confirmed that she doesn't seem to understand any Finnish yet. That makes sense.

In other news, today V has been working on her aspirated p's, which come out sounding like "puh, puh, puh." She is working on the sound she hears in words such as apple, lamp, etc. She is also doing a lot of raspberries today.

We have just looked at a clock together for the first time, and she is really enjoying whispering "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock."

Here's something interesting about her semantics, which I understand is typical: today we saw our neighbor's cats, and V repeated again and again, "Woof, woof, woof." Just like all food was "bread" for a long time, it seems that a smallish animal that you can pet is a dog.

The mammas and the pappas

Yesterday was the first day when V officially said mamma. I was putting her down to bed and she didn't want to go down yet, so she let out a pathetic and whiny "Maaaammmmaaaaa!" Now the word is firmly etched: she has used it already several times this morning.

She has already been saying dadda for a while, maybe a couple of weeks. This is not random; this really is what she calls her dad. She also knows what pappa means, she just doesn't say it.

Other new words in the past couple of days are apple and uh-oh.

I have to write this just because I think it's funny: Yesterday V was with us for our brunch group, and she spilled a bit of milk just as the server set it on the table. When the server bent down to wipe it up, V started patting her on the head and smiling, as if to say "I'm sorry."

Her most useful word, by far, continues to be bread. She uses this word to her advantage at restaurants, cafes, the dinner table, etc. It's a word that really seems to pay off for her; that is, the girl gets lots of bread.

flowers and dogs

V points at the flowers on the table when her father says, "Var är blomman?"
When I ask (in English of course), "Do you want to play with Ildiko (her friend who lives upstairs), she points at the front door.
She says something that sounds like banana. For two days now, she has been saying mamma. This morning she said something that sounded like dog.
It's amazing how fast the words are coming out now. She seems to be producing at least two new words a day.

Still 11 months

I think V may have said her first sentence yesterday. Is that possible?

Here's the situation: V's favorite word is "bread." She loves food, so every possible thing to eat is "bread" -- everything from bananas to cereal to water. She also likes to point at everything and says, "there," or at least that's what I like to think. It sounds more like "der."

Yesterday we came back from a long day that involved several hours on a train. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I bought some bananas and whatnot. The bananas were in my shoulder bag, and on the way home Vera, who was very hungry, kept pointing and saying, "There's bread."

V's first sentence! Or at least fanciful thinking on my part. At any rate, it is interesting to contrast this with her sister's first sentence in English.

V's older sister was just about to turn three when I met her. At that time, she spoke Finnish with her mother and Swedish with her father. She lived most of the time with her mother. When I entered the picture, I spoke Finnish with her at first, but quickly changed to English. This caused V's sister some frustration, but we soon moved past it, and, one year later, I remember very clearly when she uttered her first full sentence in English. We were staying at a very rustic little cabin near the sea, and I asked her "Where's your daddy?" She responded, with a funny little twinkle in her eye, "Daddy's ----ing." I was so proud of her first fully formed, grammatical English sentence! And, at age three, she had a full understanding of potty humour. Funny girl.

My husband hates that story.

11 months

Poor little V, how was she to know she would be born to a linguist? Not a linguist who knows much about language acquisition, nor multiple language acquisition, but a linguist nonetheless. Many of the books we have on multiple language acquisition are unabashed case studies of the author's own child(ren). In keeping with tradition, I feel it is my duty to report in some form, somewhere, what V is doing at what stages. And here you have it.

V has just turned 11 months old. The languages to which she is systematically exposed are Finnish, Swedish, and English. Her mother (that's me) is a native speaker of English, her father is a native speaker of Swedish (he's bilingual, actually, in Swedish and Finnish, which is a story unto itself--but let's not talk about him right now), and we live in Finland. V has Finnish speaking relatives, friends, and babysitters. I speak English with my husband, he speaks Swedish with V and his other daughter (she doesn't live with us fulltime). We speak Finnish to our dog. All of us have a basic understanding of all three languages that are spoken in our home. Except for the dog, that is.

I would say that at this stage V is exposed to English 75% of the time, Swedish 20%, and Finnish 5% or less.

That's the backdrop. So here are the most interesting bits I have observed so far. V's comprehension of Swedish and English is already quite high. She responds to such questions in Swedish as "Var är lampan?" by pointing up at the lamp. She responds the same way to the question in English: "Where's the lamp?" She responds to "V är duktig" by clapping her hands. (It means that she's a good girl. :-)) She responds similarly to "where is...?" questions in both languages (ie, "Where's Daddy?" "Where's Mommy?") She understands basic commands in English, such as "Give Mommy kisses," "wave bye-bye" and "pat the doggy." I'm not sure at this point what she understands in Finnish, if anything. I'll have to ask her babysitter.

In terms of production, most of the words seem to be in English. V says bread in English, and also bröd in Swedish--or so it seems. She says both pappa and daddy, but she doesn't say mamma (although she knows what it means). Other words are pat, tickle-tickle, and woof (as in "what does the doggy say?").

It seems quite clear, then, that she has command of her stop consonants (p, t, k, b, at least). Her vowels probably still require a little bit of imaginative listening.