Ben's new words

Ben is adding new words to his vocabulary. I caught a couple of his new words on video for Dirk to see (since he was surprised at the video clip that revealed that Benji could say, "diiiiirrrr" while playing in the dirt). Since these clips, he's started saying "bus" quite clearly.

We also had a fun time yesterday with his animal sounds game. Instead of me naming the animal and him doing the sound, he made the sound first and I named the animal. He did great until he got to the one where he can say both the name and the sound. He said, "baby" and then paused with a look of confusion on his face. Then he corrected himself and said, "wah". He laughed at getting it backwards, then off he went with animal sounds again.

He has also started babble sentences. Instead of just grunting, he'll produce an entire sentence of nonsense sounds. The sentence typically ends with "kay". (How come adults always end their sentences aimed at children by asking, "okay"? It's not like we're going to change anything if they say no.)

All of this behavior is right in line with the "Scientist in the Crib" book about how kids develop. It's kind of fun to see all that theory about kids play out in real life. Ben's next step should be to make two-word comments more common. Occasionally he'll put two words together, like "more oatmeal", but not very often. That should get a lot more common before he finally gets to full sentences.

According to the book, right now Simon is working on identifying the sounds he will need to speak English. Before a baby is six months old, they can hear any distinction in any language. Like they can hear the different tones in Chinese, the two different "d" sounds in Spanish, and the two different "v" sounds in Russian. They can hear the difference between "r" and "l" important for English speakers.

By the time a baby is about six months old, they start losing the ability to hear the sounds they don't need, and really working on hearing the sounds they will need to speak their native language. So a Japanese baby after six months loses the distinction between "r" and "l". An American baby loses the Chinese tones, and the two different "v" sounds that Russian has. Then the baby takes the sounds that are left and starts practicing them. Baby babble is the baby hard at work leaning how to talk.