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.

Let the trilingual status begin!

The title for this post is admittedly exuberant. Here's why: yesterday I brought V home from her day with the babysitter, set her down in her chair for a snack, and she promptly looked up at me, pointed at her nose and said, "Nenä." Nenä! This is the Finnish word for nose, of course, and, as far as I can tell, this marks the first official trio of words all connoting the same concept. She has already nailed English nose and Swedish näsa. OK, multilingualism is still a long way off, but what an exciting start.

Funny, actually, that the first example has to do with nose.We have somewhat of a history with noses, thanks to my mother. During a visit to my mother, when I was pregnant with V, my mother, out of the blue, told me, "You were the one kid of mine that, when you were born, I looked at you and thought, 'If this kid ever wants a nose job, I'll pay for it.'" Yeah, she's funny like that. Then when V was born, my sister asked our mother if she had seen any pictures of V yet, and my mom answered, "Yes, she has a big nose like her mom's."

So that's our history with noses, although it has little to do with language. (Are our noses really that big?)

Continuing on from my digression, then. Here are some new English words as of the past week or so: kiwi, mouse, ears, truck, again, boots, and mackey, which means 'macaroni.'

She has also learned some new names of people. She says Pia, Sirpa-täti, Amber, and Emily (actually, she says that name constantly, because she wants to play with her friend).

And a new animal sound: the sheep says "baaa," of course!

There is one morpheme that V has uses for such a long time that I actually overlooked it. This is the diminutive -y that we use in English. It's interesting that her use of this is absolutely grammatical; we attach this morpheme only to nouns, and this is what she does, and very productively--"Sockies, ducky, doggy, kitty," etc. The diminutive form is in addition to the base form of each of those words, of course, so it's not just a matter of her mistakenly thinking that the word dog, for example, is actually doggy.

In terms of semantics, V continue to use a couple of general words when she doesn't know a better word. Examples are her use of apple and dog. In V's world, an "apple" is any round or circular food, either real food or what she sees in pictures. So oranges, cucumber slices, meatballs--those all get called "apple." Any picture she sees of an animal with four legs, provided that she doesn't have another name for it, gets called "dog." A little argument that we have over and over again when we look at her picture book goes like this:

Me: Horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
Me: That's not a dog, that's a horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
And so on, for as long as I allow it to continue. At this point, there is simply no convincing her that the horse is not a dog. Oh well, you have to pick your battles.