Then suddenly, towards the end of her 21st month, her vocabulary took off! By the end of that month she had at least 30 words. (Her first 30 included some usual suspects, like no, baby, Daddy ("Dada") and this ("dis"), and some very, um, unique choices, like Sears ("Seeuh") and shock ("sha," meaning a static electricity shock which she got going down the slide). By 20 1/2 months she was consistently adding two or three new words a day, and by 22 1/4 months she was up to about 60 words, including, finally, Mama! (At first she still didn't address me as Mama, but would point to a picture of me and say Mama.) After that point I stopped keeping track, but I would guess she's said at least a couple hundred by now. (My criteria for counting a word as a word are that it has to be said spontaneously, not just as a repetition of something someone else has just said, and that it has to be said in a context where it makes sense.)
Mind you, it's not always easy to recognize a word! At first, many words sounded alike. Humidifier, firehat, and her friend Safina were all "fie." Ball, bus and diaper were all "ba." Car and doll were both "dah." Usually the only reason I understood what she was saying was context! But it has been fascinating to watch her language develop, and it has put me back into linguist mode.
I remember, for instance, that in my second language acquisition class we were introduced to the concept of an "interlanguage." This is a regular system used by a learner (the human brain is a great regularizer!) which matches neither the learner's native language nor the target language. Well, Esther's language development is essentially first language acquisition, despite her experience with Chinese, but I can definitely see an interlanguage at work. For the most part, she follows very regular rules in translating English words into her own pronunciation. At the beginning, her rules for syllables would have looked something like this: All words are one syllable and all syllables are open (that is, they end with a vowel and not a consonant). When she first began producing words with two syllables, she usually used two matching syllables (Dada, Mama, "bear-bear" for her panda bear, and "bee-bee" for blanket, baby or bellybutton--Tim pointed out that there was great potential for confusion if people saw Esther pointing at my tummy and saying "bee-bee"!) Now she can pronounce multiple different syllables, but she is going through a phase where the final syllable of new multisyllabic words ends in "ee." So her friend Noah is "noewee," stroller is "stoewee," an umbrella is "UHbehwee," elephant is "EHfoewee," and the swimming pool (unfortunately) is "puwee." For a while, lotion and rolling were both "wowee" (lotion has now graduated to being "woeshee"). When Tim was putting on lotion one day and she was saying "wowee" and rubbing her arm, he understandablyt thought she was trying to tell him that her arm hurt--but actually she was telling him that she wanted lotion on her arm. Interestingly, her rules don't seem to apply to words that she started saying before they were formulated. Despite her not putting final consonants on syllables until recently, three of her very early words (this, mine and five) have all had the correct final consonant from the beginning. And the "wee" rule doesn't seem to apply to, say, apple, which she has been pronouncing completely correctly for a while now.
Another tidbit from linguistics is the concept of underlying form, the idea that our mental representation of a linguistic structure may contain more information than is evident from the language that we actually produce. Well, one characteristic of English is that vowel length and quality is affected by the following consonant. Vowels followed by voiceless stop consonants (/p/ /t/ and /k/) are shorter than vowels followed by other consonants. And even though Esther wasn't pronouncing final consonants, the vowels were being affected by the consonants that should have been there! For example, even though the words on and off were both "aw," I could tell the difference because the length was different. Fascinating! At about 23 months she started adding in the final consonants on words like off, bus and step. As for milk...well, that will come up in another paragraph!
Another fascinating set of rules in Esther's interlanguage has to do with how she handles sounds she can't pronounce. Right now she can't pronounce /r/ at the beginning of a word or /l/ anywhere in a word, so she substitutes /w/, which is a pretty common speech characteristic of young children. She also substitutes /f/ for /th/--again, very common. The other sounds she has trouble with are the velar consonants (/k/ and /g/ and presumably /ng/), and that is where things really get interesting. This particular difficulty is not unusual in young children, and the normal "fix" is to substitute /t/ for /k/ and /d/ for /g/. Esther does that sometimes: go is "doe," for example. But when there is another consonant in the word, Esther will sometimes borrow the characteristics of THAT consonant to substitute for the one she can't pronounce. So grape is not "day" but "bay." Scoop is not "stoo" but "spoo" (or occasionally "poo" or "poop"). Catch is not "teh" but "cheh." And milk went through a month of being not "miwt" but "miwp." However, cup and cap were "tuh" and "tae," so the rule wasn't completely regular--or at any rate, I couldn't figure out the subtleties. (As of this writing, more than a month after I began work on this entry, most if not all of these pronunciations have disappeared, and she is now substituting /t/ and /d/ as one would expect.)
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