It's just over two weeks since my last post on language development, but in that time Helen has:
- produced her first two word phrases: "more cherry" and "daddy book". The first was pretty clearly an imperative construction, meaning something like "give me more cherries", the second was most probably a possessive, as it follows a lot of sequential "daddy" (or "mine"), "mummy", "helen" productions, naming in turn the owners of different bowls or cups/mugs (or fridge magnets: see photo right).
- learned to (mostly accurately) use lots of colour words: at least yellow, red, orange, blue, green, brown, and white.
- worked out how to get all the shapes into the Shape-O sorter, and even how to name them all. (Though her rendering of "trapezoid" would be unrecognisable to anyone else, or even to me out of context.)
- learned how to play Snap with a set of animal cards
Various sources suggest children may learn nine or ten words a day starting around this age, and that seems entirely plausible.
You never cease to amaze me with your meticulous plotting of Helen's progress. One day, this will become a definitive work on child psychology, and bring up children. Helen certain chose her parents very carefully.
I'm collecting fairly random observations with no methodological planning, so this is actually pretty much totally useless from a scientific perspective.