My 14-month-old daughter still has a fairly small spoken vocabulary ("ball", "shoe", "no", and "bye"), but she clearly understands a lot more than she can say. The first time I saw evidence of this was a month ago, when we were playing with a toy of hers that rewards simple actions---pressing a button, turning a knob---with plastic animals that pop up. As I identified one of them as "giraffe", she suddenly got up and retrieved her stuffed giraffe. She's since showed us that she knows "balloon", "book", "block", and a few other common items.
This evening before bed we were reading a book with pictures of baby animals. I wasn't surprised when she responded "meow" to my identification of the cats, but I didn't understand why "pony" prompted her to keep patting herself on the top of her head. Then I figured it out: she was fingering the location of the ponytail I had just removed!
- Language Lover
- In no particular order: mom, engineer, activist, polyglot, violinist, Unitarian Universalist
2 comments:
That's cute! I ran into a similar story just yesterday, in a blog entry about digital cameras:
"Dispatch from the grandparents:
Last Sunday, your mother and The Kid were in the study. She pointed to the telephone and said “telephone” and he said “telephone.” She pointed to the computer and said “computer” and he said “computer.” She pointed to the camera and said “camera” and he said “no touch.”
Hee hee...that kid is better trained than my own! In our house, pointing to the digital camera would likely result in, "I wanna take a picture!"
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