Father's Day Tuesday: Soccer Dad on first words
I'm happy to have David Gerstman, the local blogger better known as Soccer Dad, as our Guest Dad today. When he's not blogging, he's helping to raise six kids (17, 15, 14, 9, 6 and 20 months.) Today, he's got a nice post on the way kids develop language.
"One of the joys of parenting comes from observing how children learn to communicate," he writes. "Of course, when they're infants they cry and a parent has to sort out what different cries mean. It's a skill and there's no way to teach it. But eventually a parent learns when a child is hungry, uncomfortable or just plain tired.
"When children start speaking, they're generalists. Words often have more than one meaning." ...
"When our oldest was about a year and a half she'd ride her rocking horse and say "lolly, lolly, lolly" in a sing song voice. I don't know if we ever figured out the source of "lolly," but we did learn that it wasn't just a tune. Once in D.C. we put her on a merry-go-round. After one time around it was time to move on and as I lifted her from the horse, a ear-splitting cry of "l-o-l-l-y" filled the air. A horse was also a "lolly." (At the age of 3 or 4 when she saw her first blimp on Preakness day, she called it an "airplane balloon," a rather clever construction, if I may boast.)
Five years ago, another daughter was the same age. All animals to her were "Max." Max is my in-laws' dog, and she associated all animals with the dog. Once she saw a group of birds and ran towards them shouting "Max." The birds didn't understand and flew away.
Our baby is now at that age. "Cookie" is likely any food that's round or that she wants to eat. (This is a sign that she's #6; our older children wouldn't be so familiar with cookies at this age!) She does have exceptions such as "lalla" (for challah, specially prepared bread for the Sabbath) or "chee" (cheese.) Drinks are "bottle" (for bottle). The exception is for her Dora cups which are "Dora." "Buckle" means traveling either in the stroller or the car.
Then there's here prefix "ah." "Ah-bottle" means "I want a bottle ... RIGHT NOW."
As a child gets older, she starts differentiating more. But some of the fun of learning her language is lost too. (Yes, I have boys too, but I don't remember their early speech patterns.)"
What were your kids' first all-purpose words?
Baltimoresun.com's 
Comments
My now 13 y.o. used to point and say "la" to whatever he wanted - food, toys, bottle, whatever. He also had a security blanket (actually it was a shirt) whose name later became "La" - because he seemed to want that the most.
Posted by: Suzie Q | May 20, 2008 10:08 AM
Cute post!
It took us a long time to decode what it meant when my son said "goq." We finally figured it out when we were in church and he was looking at a baby animal book. He turned to a page with ducklings on it and said, loudly, "Goq! Goq goq goq goq."
My 18 month old daughter calls all cats "Jameson," who is our cat, and if she asks, "More muk?" you have to look to see what she's pointing at, because it might mean more crackers.
Posted by: Kayris | May 20, 2008 11:05 AM