That was one of my daughter’s first “sentences.” While it’s missing all sorts of parts, it’s hard to argue with the clarity, simplicity, logic, and effectiveness in communicating a very specific thought.
The aforementioned sentence was uttered a couple of weeks ago during the hour-long process of exiting the house to get to Eleanor’s second swim lesson. She was very excited, and I could see the wheels turning in her head as she processed the order of events necessary to experience swimming. She paused between each word, pronouncing them carefully to make sure I understood her.
It was a bitterly cold morning in a series of bitterly cold mornings, so Eleanor knew we wouldn’t be leaving the house unless she put on her hat and coat. Once those conditions were satisfied, then it was time to go to the garage. Then we get in the car and go to class.
Simple enough concept, but if you think about the working memory necessary to communicate all these words in a relatively logical order in a short period of time, it’s impressive. Anyone who’s learned a second language and then found themselves in a country where that language is the native tongue can attest to the difficulty of real-time expression. When you’re excited, you’re highly motivated, but you’re also easily flustered. My daughter’s resiliency in the face of impending sensory overload in the pool makes me smile. It also fascinates me.
The sheer number of words in her vocabulary astonish me. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I (briefly) attempted to keep track of my daughter’s new words. I gave up a few weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up anymore. She’s using 3 to 5 new words a day, at least, and that’s been fairly consistent for a couple of months. I need to explain that this isn’t meant to sound like bragging. I find development fascinating, and while I am particularly gleeful to be able to enter into real conversations with my daughter, I recognize the vast differences just among the children I’ve known in my life. Everybody moves at their own pace, and most kids end up in pretty similar places, cognitively speaking.
Book book book bus bus bus moon moon moon stars stars sky walk go mall play shoes shoes shoes socks socks socks (apple)sauce!
These are popular words in my daughter’s lexicon. It is a corpus mostly consisting of nouns, a few verbs and a very, very short list of adjectives. I suspect that in her mind they are all nouns, really. “Go” is naming a thing that happens more than a word conjugated to get a subject acting in some way.
I love listening to the way she uses prior knowledge and phonetic success to build new words. “Book” has led to “Boot.” “Socks” has led to “Sauce.” The fact that the only characteristics these words share are phonemes and part of speech leads me to believe that her unspoken, understood vocabulary is gigantic compared to the words she can say.
I love being witness to this language acquisition process. I used to be a Spanish teacher, so I am predisposed to love watching someone figure out how to communicate. But it’s really special to watch my daughter figure it out. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this moment for her entire life.
It’s pretty cool.
