On girls and boys and my

The communication level has definitely gone up a notch -- or several, actually.

Little V just turned 3. Lots has been happening in the past few months.

Perhaps the most major milestone is that she started going every day to a Swedish speaking nursery school. Within a few weeks, she was using Swedish words in her English when she talked to me. What she usually does, though, is to use an English (American) pronunciation, and she leaves off the word endings that would be there in Swedish. What a useful trick! It's usually nouns she substitutes, which makes sense. A good example is, "Let's put the baby in her säng." Säng is Swedish for 'bed.'

There is a shift in her competences -- Swedish is no doubt her strongest language already -- and, along with that, a shift in her preferences. She likes speaking in Swedish. Whereas English used to be the default choice, she now regularly switches into Swedish, even at home. For bilingual children, this is pretty well attested. Even if they are playing alone, they subconsciously switch into the language of the person who is there, even in a background role. So if I'm alone with her at home, but in the kitchen while she is in the bedroom, for example, she'll speak English to herself. But if it's her dad at home alone with her, she'll speak Swedish to herself. This can change, in an instant, however; if she starts doing something when I am there that "feels" Swedish, like doing some kind of play that she does at her nursery school, she'll momentarily lapse into Swedish. It's amazing to see how a language goes along with other cognitive factors.

V's Finnish has definitely deteriorated. She simply isn't exposed to it in a systematic way any longer. Although we live in Finland, she actually hears very little Finnish. She is able to respond in Finnish if someone speaks to her in public (which doesn't happen too much -- this is Finland, after all) but her breadth of expression in Finnish has become tiny compared to her capability in Swedish and English. She is quite uncharacteristically subdued and quiet in situations where the people around her are speaking Finnish. (On a personal note: I know how she feels. I am absolutely uncharacteristically quiet in Finnish, simply because I lack the overall communicative repertoire.)

In terms of her grammar, there is one interesting thing she has been doing now for a few weeks. She is mixing the use of the first person object pronoun in English with the possessive pronoun. She'll say, for example, "Mamma, can you carry my to my bed?" Or, "Emma gave it to my." For now, anyway, no amount of correcting her seems to be sinking in. She has pretty much nailed other deictic expressions, including I and you, but these other pronouns are still in flux.

And now for a heartbreaking story. I have been teaching a course on language and gender at the university, and for several weeks we have been talking about how the default gender in English is he, and how toys, games, books, clothing, etc., are marked for gender even for young children.

One thing I have been doing lately, although I know it doesn't make a difference in the big scheme of things, is to replace the he with she when I read children's stories to V. Seriously, take a look around you: a HUGE majority of the books for children are about boys or "he," even when the book is about a character that doesn't really even need to be marked for gender (like a turtle, for example). Women make up more than half of the world's population (I think it's 51 percent), so why should children's books not mirror this?

Anyway, I have been carrying over the same kind of ploys when we play with her toys and games. So, for example, when she got a Legos set for her birthday, which included an airplane and two human-like figures to go with it, I said, "Look, here are two girls that go with your airplane!" Because I'm thinking, of course, why should these little Logos figures be marked for gender? Here comes the heartbreaking part: she didn't buy it. She picked up one of the figures and scrutinized it. "Mamma, this one is not a girl," she said. "This one is a guy." And she was right: she has already been socialized. The figure she was looking at was depicted wearing a baseball hat and overalls--clearly clothes for "guys." I am pretty sure that even a couple of months ago she wouldn't have known the difference; she would use girl and boy pretty much interchangeably. I wonder what happened?

Little big girl

The most important social development recently is that V has started going to her Swedish-language daycare. We're well into Week 3 now, and she is flourishing. Already, her Swedish language skills are burgeoning; she is more articulate than ever. Her vocabulary in Swedish has expanded enormously. In fact, she has already started using some Swedish words when she speaks English to me. She seems to do this most frequently with words that are similar in the two languages -- and there are a lot of similar words. For example, the other day she said, "Look, Mamma, there's an äpple (which in Swedish is pronounced "epp-lay").

Her Finnish is noticably weaker than English and Swedish, which, of course, is hardly surprising, since she very rarely uses Finnish. Still, she does communicate freely in Finnish, although at a much more modest level. She is normally a very talkative child, who can tell stories about what has happened at home or at daycare and to her friends, and so on, but in Finnish, her conversation is limited to more along the lines of "Look at this. What is this? Put it there." That kind of thing. Curiously, the one thing she seems to refer to in Finnish at the expense of Swedish or English is books: she seems to favor the Finnish word kirja 'book.'

One of her favorite language games at the moment is to choose a thing--a dog, let's say--and describe all the words she knows for it, like this, "Pappa says hund. Mamma says dog. Mummu (Grandma) says koira." She doesn't yet have the concepts of Swedish, English, and Finnish, so she expresses this idea through who in her world uses what language.

A few months ago I wrote something about her consonant clusters. Basically, she didn't have them yet. Snake was "'nake," play was "p'ay," strong was "st'ong" and Steve was "'teve." I would venture to say that she gets most combinations at this point, although I am not 100 percent sure.

Also in terms of phonology, there has been some substitution of sounds in English, although this seems to be subsiding. For example, for a long time she would express the desire to be "make-ed" rather than "naked," and Pippi Longstocking's friend Annika was "Ammika."


There are clear developments in syntax and morphology, as well. Today she surprised me by saying, "It keeps falling down." I don't know why I thought she shouldn't have this structure, but for some reason it stuck out. There has also been progress in her use of negation in English. A few months ago, she would say something like, "Maybe it goes there not," rather than "Maybe it doesn't go there." That doesn't happen any more.

One feature that is in flux right now is her use of first and second personal pronouns. She still routinely uses "you" when she means "me" in a sentence like "Mamma help you!" This really means "Mamma help me!" She seems to have learned this expression as a unit, and it's taking her a while to figure out that it's a "you" that belongs there. In other contexts, however, she uses "I" freely and also grammatically, especially in her new favorite sentence: No, I'll do it!" (Even though it does sometimes use her own name instead of "I.")

One interesting feature I have noticed lately is her way of marking something that has happened in the past. She knows how to use past tense verbs, but her only temporal adverbial is yesterday. So she might want to express something along the lines of "We visited our friends this summer," but instead she'll say something like "We visited our friend's yesterday." Yesterday in such a sentence can mean something that happened earlier that day, a month ago, or any other time in the past.

An interesting presentation about language acquisition

Here is a video link to a presentation by Professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington. I find a lot of what she says interesting, but especially that a) the sounds of a child's native language are already more or less in place by the age of 10 months, and b) children can't acquire a native language from listening to a recording or watching TV. They can only learn it from human interaction. A lot of people seem to think they can teach their babies languages, math, whatever, by plopping them in front of a TV. Here is a very smart woman who says otherwise.
Here is the link http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html

Now she knows

V is starting to show awareness of the fact she has more than one language in her life. By this I mean that she overtly comments on it. She’ll say, for example, “Mamma says thank you, but Pappa says tack.” She's doing a lot of this, actually. She doesn't seem to mention Finnish, however, probably because it's not a home language for us.

However, when she talks to herself while playing or falling asleep in her bed at night, she often switches to Finnish. I would love to know what prompts the switch. Probably, though, it just means that she is thinking about someone with whom she speaks Finnish.

And sometimes, when the mood hits her, she’ll express the desire to watch one of her favorite shows in Swedish or Finnish instead of in English. These kids today are so smart: they know that we can change the language coming out of the TV with a flip of a button.

Green

I filmed this little video so I could demonstrate for one of my classes how V uses consonant clusters. Consonant clusters are any group of consonants sounds that occur together in a word. The word star, for example, starts with a consonant cluster (s+t). English has lots and lots of consonant clusters, but in many of the world’s languages, they don’t really occur. Many languages, such as Japanese, Hawaiian, even Finnish, pretty much have the word structure consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (ie, CVCVCV, not CCVCC and so on).
In the video, V and I are talking about colors. What stands out the most to me, in terms of her pronunciation, is how her pronunciation of the word green varies pretty much each time she says it. In the first instance, she epenthesizes to break up the consonant cluster of the g and the r. That’s just a fancy way of saying that she adds a vowel: she says ‘gah-reen.’ The next time says green, it comes out ‘geen,’ without the r. The next time she says green, she very carefully articulates the r, so it comes out right on target, with the g+r consonant cluster intact. The next two times, however, she pronounces it ‘geen.’
OK, so why am I going on about consonant clusters, right? In the reading I was doing to prepare for my class, it was reported that kids don’t master consonant clusters in English until they are about three years old. Here is a nice little example of how V, age 2 and a half years, is working out the kinks. She has a couple of different strategies for dealing with that unwieldy consonant cluster in the word green: she epenthesizes, she leaves out the r, and one time, she totally nails it. Soon, she’ll be able to pronounce it on target every time, so this is like a little mini progress report.

Actually ...

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's post was about V's acquisition of adverbs and adverbials. I am not sure how typical this is, but it nonetheless slays me every time when V breaks out with an, "Actually, mamma, that's pappa's." Or, "The bunnies are actually sleeping." She is really, really fond of the word actually. And, furthermore, she uses it grammatically every time!

I have noticed plenty of use of adverbial forms lately. Things like, "First we go here. Then we go here." Lots of other examples, too, but none I can think of at the moment.

ellemenopee

Here's a bit of news about English. As of today, she can officially pronounce the /s/ sound in ice cream. For the longest time, icecream was pronounced something like 'i-keem.' Now it's 'ice keem.' Especially considering how fond she is of the stuff, this is a big deal.

In other news: she counts at will (and often!) to 10 in English. And she sings up to the letter P in the alphabet song. This little girl can carry a tune, too! This is sort of embarrassing, but it never occurred to me until I was in my 30s that the alphabet song and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" share the same melody. Yeah, seriously, I am that thick headed. My daughter, on the other hand, has figured this out at the age of 2.

Now here is something that cracks me up. I teach about dialects in my classes, so naturally it's quite amazing for me to hear my daughter using dialectal features in her English that I don't have. Lately, she has been doing this kind of twangy, New York-kind of vowel in words like hand and banana. She draws the /a/ sound out so that it sounds like 'hiiiend.' I am pretty sure she doesn't get this from me! So where does she get it? No idea. Another one she has come out with lately is a distinctly British pronunciation of no. She says 'neeeou.' She has picked this up from a friend of ours who is from London. I'm telling you, these kids are like sponges. It's going to be so interesting to see what kind of English she will eventually end up speaking -- General American (as linguists call it), like I do, or some kind of British/English mix (many of the people here in Finland speak British English), some kind of Finglish, or something else entirely?

One thing is sure, she'll end up speaking Helsinki Swedish, because that's going to be her speech community (speech community: another linguisty term). My husband's native variety is from the southern part of Sweden (Skåne), but he only speaks that variety, really, when he talks to his family who still lives there. Still, his Swedish has not mutated into Helsinki Swedish--and it never will at his age. V's Swedish now sounds like her dad's, but once she starts school, it's sure to morph into Helsinki Swedish.

Lord help us.

I'm not exactly sure what to report about her Finnish, other than that she seems to be able to hold her own. I don't think she has any communication problems. Her babysitter made a point of telling me a few days ago that V said 'no' (ei) in Finnish for the first time. A milestone, indeed! My daughter can now officially say 'no' in three languages -- four after our recent trip to Germany.

I've been asking a lot of Finnish speakers if V seems to have any kind of American accent when she speaks Finnish. The answer seems to be -- thank goodness -- no. She just sounds Finnish. I hope she'll be able to keep her Finnish skills going once she starts going to Swedish-speaking nursery school next fall. Because Finnish is the main language here, however, she'll probably be OK.

Mishmash

Here's another general update about V's languages.

First of all, she is pretty comfortable in all language settings, especially Finnish and English. I have noticed a couple of times that when we are around Swedish speaking kids that she doesn't know, she doesn't try to talk to them. It seems like she is trying to figure out, "Hmmm. I am not quite sure what to say to these people." And yet she watches them with distinct interest, and she clearly understands what they are saying. Sometimes I feel like her use of languages impedes her willingness to get in and mix with other kids, because she is standing back, trying to relate to what she hears going on around her. For example, the other day I took her to a gymnastics class for toddlers, and she spent most of the time going around listening to what the other kids were saying, rather than playing, jumping and shouting the way they all did. There were Finnish, English and Swedish speaking kids there, and it seemed to kind of throw her off. Of course, this could just be her personality: she has always been a "thinker" rather than being the first kid to jump in and start doing stuff.

I never really hear her speak Swedish outside the context of our home, however, which I find interesting. It's as if she hasn't quite figured out that this language transfers to other situations, as well--like English and Finnish do. This will surely change: we recently made the (very difficult) decision to send V to Swedish speaking nursery school here in Helsinki, followed by education in Swedish, so I fully suspect that Swedish will eventually be her dominant language.

The amount of vocabulary that comes out in all her languages is really something. She mentions words and names of people that she has encountered only once, and sometimes many weeks previously. Where do kids this age store all this information? It amazes me. This is kind of a weird example, but the other day I pulled something out of the fridge (can't remember what it was) and said, smelled it, and said, "Oh, this looks like it got old." V looked at it and said, "It's oldy." I didn't understand what she meant. "Do you mean it's old?" I asked. I could see the wheels turning in her head for a second, then she said, "It's moldy. Moldy." She had been searching for that word and couldn't find it, but then she accessed it and used it in exactly the right circumstances. A couple of points worth mentioning here: I don't know when I had ever used the word moldy around her, but clearly I had at some point, and second, I would like to defend my housekeeping skills and say that she was actually wrong--the food was not moldy!

The sounds are coming out quite on target in all her languages. I think the sound that gives her the hardest time is the Finnish/Swedish r, which is rolled like it would be in Spanish or Italian. Depending on the word, she says this sound either as an [l] or a [d]. In English, however, she says the r sound perfectly.

The other sound that seems to give her a hard time is s, if it comes at the beginning of a word before another consonant. She leaves the s sound out, so that, for example, "stinky" is tinky and "Steve" is teve. We've been practicing this lately, though, and she can produce the s sound if we really focus on it: "ssssssssssstinky."

I have noted previously that her grammar had lacked target-like negation and use of first and second person pronouns. This has changed. Only once in a while does she produce a non-target negative statement. The other day, for example, she came up with an interesting one. Our friend who helps us with the cleaning was here, and V likes to follow her around the house saying, "She's so busy. She's so busy." This particular day, she came to me and said many times, "Mamma not so busy." OK, this is quite an embarrassing observation for me, but what I want to point out is that it's still pretty close to the target: She is just missing the copula -s.

V can count to 8 in English, but not in other languages.

It's interesting that she knows her letters of the alphabet in Swedish, but not in English. She spends quite a bit of time with her dad looking at her alphabet magnets and also books in Swedish. This is one domain in which she transfers labels from one language to the other: she hasn't yet figured out, it seems, that the letters have different names in her languages. In Swedish, for example, the letter "i" is called ee, like the English letter "e." You can see where this would be potentially confusing, but I'm sure she'll work it out eventually.

One thing that amazed a visitor we had here recently was how V has different animal sounds for each language. I guess I had already gotten used to that fact, but it blew him away! Speaking of this friend, he happened to be travelling with a banjo (you have to love someone who comes from New York carrying a banjo!), and, naturally, V was blown away by that. She got her very first banjo lesson, and then, after a few minutes, she left the room, saying, "I have a banjo, too." Well, we were all very curious to see what she considered "her" banjo to be.

She soon came back into the room blowing into her little toy clarinet. It's easy to see the logic she was using: "A banjo is something that plays music, so this thing must be a banjo, too."

"Are you crying?"

Last night when I was putting V to bed, she gave me an extra, extra, extra hard time. It appears she is at the age when they start testing boundaries ... and they don't stop for a long, long time, from what I understand -- if ever.

For about an hour, she was calling out, "Mamma! Mamma!" over every little thing she could come up with. She wanted to read a book. She was thirsty. She wanted her blanket. She wanted her nightlight turned off. All of these pleas I could ignore, but what finally got me was when she called out, "Mamma, put on a clean diaper!" I had put a clean one on her just as I put her down for the night, so I couldn't figure out this request. When I went to check what was happening, she was stripped naked to the waist, and was holding her supposedly soiled diaper up for me to inspect. However, it wasn't wet at all, and she officially had found a foolproof way to get me to come in her room: no way am I going to let her sleep without a diaper on at this stage in her life. I put on a fresh diaper and admonished her, saying that I wouldn't come into her room anymore, no matter what, and that it was time to sleep.

Then she started in on the fake crying. As she cried, she said to herself over and over in a loud, soothing voice, "What's the matter, sweetheart? Why are you crying, baby?"

So here I get the language-related point of this post. V continues to refer to herself in the second person, although once in a while she slips in an "I" ("I want milk," etc.). She also mimics what I say to her, which is what she was doing when she was consoling herself during her crying fit (she was imagining what a nice mommy would have said ...!). She frequently asks me a question that seems to be directed at herself, perhaps anticipating what I myself would say to her: "Did Nik give you a shovel?" (when she herself has a shovel in her hand). "Did you eat all your macaroni?" "Are you sad, sweetheart?" Etc.

Since I only speak English to her, it continues to surprise me when she comes out with conversations and words in her other languages. Tonight with her daddy she was naming letters of the alphabet in Swedish. It was kind of hit and miss, but still, she knows the right terms, even if she doesn't usually match them to the right letter. She also knows the names of all her fingers (the equivalent of middle finger, ring finger, etc.) in Swedish. She doesn't know those terms in English, so it's interesting to get clear evidence of how her language skills are related to the relationships she has and what she tends to do/talk about with different people.

And counting

Probably the biggest news over the last few days is that V is keen on counting everything from the steps to our apartment to the number of macaroni pieces on her plate. She now gets up to about four, then she might skip to six or seven, but some semblance of the numbers 1-10 are all in there. I can also hear her counting to herself (sheep, maybe?) when she falls asleep at night. What's encouraging about her counting objects is that this makes me think she might actually understand that numbers quantify things--in other words, she's not just reciting a list, she might actually understand what numbers signify. Clearly, this would be a milestone. I should note, however, that I am only aware of her doing this in English. I think she knows at least the first three numbers of both Finnish and Swedish, but I don't think she uses them productively.

There has been evidence of other kinds of abstract thinking. She has been making comparisons about what she wants today based on what she had yesterday, for example. I noted some weeks ago that she lacks most prepositions, and this is still the case, so she strings together whatever words she knows to get her point across. One day she didn't like the yogurt I tried to give her for her breakfast, so she advised me, "Same yogurt yesterday." OK, so the as was missing, but she got her point across.

Here's another milestone: she has figured out that our matrix language in this country is Finnish. It used to be that in a new situation she would follow my lead, speaking whatever language I spoke (often accompanied by weird looks at me -- "Mom, why are you butchering Finnish when you're supposed to be speaking English?" We follow the one parent/one language rule). The other day we were in a store where there were model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, and V found this very exciting. I asked the sales clerk a question in English, and V, still excited about the airplanes, said to him, "There's a ..." Then she thought for a moment and switched to Finnish: "lentokone" (that's airplane in Finnish). Ever since, she has spoken Finnish as default when we have been in public. I find this an amazing revelation.

Here's something else of interest. V has been home with us during the holidays, meaning that she has not been with her babysitter for two weeks. Apparently, during this brief time, V's English started to subsume her Finnish. Today the babysitter reported that V was very talkative in Finnish, asking the same questions over and over again, as if trying to reconnect to the language (and, no doubt, to the babysitter, as well. V really missed her!).

I haven't written about particulars here for a long while, so here is a brief list of language-related occurrences during the past few weeks.

October 27: The first time V constructed a question in English, using verb inversion: "Can you make (it)?"
October 28: first use of a possessive pronoun + noun: "This is my bottle." Since, she has pretty much nailed the use of possessive, including mine, yours, etc.
November 1: Baby's first curse words! "Damn it!" OK, not my proudest moment as a mother, but, in my defense, we had just moved to a new apartment, so there was plenty of stress in the air ... along with the cursing.
November 17: Another example of semantic extension: She referred to the skin of a kiwi as a "crust," asking me to "take the crust away."
November 30: She spontaneously counted three meatballs.
December 21: The first time I noticed her using a dependent clause: "I think it's a light." She now uses such constructions frequently.
December 27: OK, this is just an unabashedly cute story. She kept wanting to open her Christmas calendars even after December 24, although I tried to explain numerous times that Christmas was over. Finally, one morning, she pointed to her room, where the calendars and plenty of other Christmas detritus was still hanging out. She said, as if to correct me, "Christmas is over there."

One more point I have been meaning to mention is her developing system for negation. She understands that both not and no are related to negation in English, but she hasn't yet figured out the positioning. She'll accurately say, for example, "No, not this one," but she also sometimes says, "No this one." She has yet to acquire the use of negation with verbs. Usually, she says something like, "Mamma not do it." I suppose the use of the periphrastic do will come much, much later ("Mamma doesn't do it.")