talking in 3... 2... 1...

Now that Dd is approaching 10 months, it is time to get excited about talking!

Baby sign language requires interlocutors who are actively looking for signs, just like understanding early spoken words requires a lot of attentive listening.  With that in mind, in the last month Dd has signed "book," "more," and "milk." 

It was exciting to see "book" signed in conjunction with saying "buh buh buh" and looking at a stack of books.  This was a few days before Dd reached 9 months, for those of us interested in accuracy :) and at the time his typical babble sound was "bah", not "buh". 

I recall that "buh" was a popular early sound for D as well (and probably most kids), though we latched on to the idea of it meaning "bus" given the context of what we saw so often on walks and out our downtown apartment windows.

Jack saw Dd sign "dad" but it has yet to be repeated.

Verbally he has said some joyful "dada" and just the other day "mommy" a few times when he was tired and a little distressed while being cared for by someone else.  (I heard it from the other room though). 

Dd is quite in to clapping and waving these days.  When we walk anywhere near a mirror in our house he starts waving in anticipation of seeing his reflection.  He claps (and slaps his knees) while listening to music, but also claps at other times.  It's funny to think that the sign for "more" so closely resembles clapping, and when you get down to it the meaning of "more" and bravo or encore are basically the same.

Lastly, a few interesting things I have read about early communication are:
- people sometimes think signing delays verbal speech, but the opposite is true
- bilingualism leads to some early confusion but does not cause delays
- extended pacifier use does lead to later speech
- leaving aside signing, speaking with lots of hand gestures is really good for learning, for babies and everyone else.
        - www.parentingscience.com/gestures "Babies exposed to lots of communicative gestures
              appear to learn language more quickly, and acquire bigger vocabularies."
        - I vividly remember how using gestures helped me understand matrix multiplication in high school.

preschool en français

In April, D started at another preschool two mornings a week.  It took quite a bit of research to find a school we liked which could be paired with his daycare.  I've learned that places that call themselves preschools, rather than daycare centers, tend to follow the public school schedule, meaning that they close all summer long, in addition to winter, mid-winter and spring breaks.  Giving up our daycare was really not an option and I would have been sad to give up the community we have there.  The other obstacle was that the daycare requires three adjacent days of the week as the minimum for part time, while many preschools offer only M/W/F or Tu/Th options for part time.   Finally we managed to find a great school that was flexible about dates.  His grandparents pick him up and spend two afternoons a week with him.

The school is French immersion, which is pretty exciting.  The staff is wonderful and all those holiday breaks make them very energized.  Two days a month they spend the whole morning in one of my favorite Seattle parks.  They have a great balance of structure and freedom, fun toys and a good outdoor space, and they send us pictures every day so we get to see just how swell everything is.

So the obvious question is, how much French has D learned?  The short answer is, not that much, but I'm still happy about it.

The longer answer follows.  We wanted to give him this opportunity, primarily for the mind expanding exposure to a new language during this developmental window.  Our ability to participate more in French than other languages made it a good choice, but beyond that it's not really about the specific language.

In March, before he started, I taught him to count to 10 and he picked it up quickly.  Three and half months later he says only a few other things like greetings.  Comprehension is much harder to judge.  He seems to understand some questions and instructions about food and things he likes.  Mostly though, the French immersion seems to have magnified his comfort with the idea of multiple ways to say things.  He knows "bleu" (blue) and claims that red is "reh" (it's "rouge").  He asks how to say things in French and then tells me that some random combination of sounds is how you say something else in French.  These last few months he has strongly preferred to sing his own made up song lyrics (some with real English words and some with nonsense), where he used to like singing songs we had learned together.  Now he knows that most of the time we speak English.  He is unencumbered by French spelling (think of all the extra letters) and has generally excellent pronunciation.  He's been much less frustrated by not understanding things at school than I thought he would be.  Today he told me he loves his main teacher there.

Here are some of my favorite school pictures from this spring.

D’s 15 month vocabulary update

Just after my previous vocabulary post in mid April (the state of the vocabulary), D went radio silent, except for variations on “baa,” for a whole month while he focused on walking.

We are now in the midst of a language explosion where D demonstrates new words and signs almost every day!  I don’t know who is more excited, him or us.

Let me preface this by explaining what qualifies as a word for us.  These are words observed a by attentive parents (and a linguist, to boot), with a lot of context.  Everything here has been observed at least twice.  Verbal words have some of the right sounds, but usually not all of them.   These words come and go.  Sounds like the /s/ at the end of “bus” have come and gone and come back again over the course of 5-6 months.  The signs, like the sounds aren’t quite right, and they are limited by his dexterity.  Despite all these qualifications and caveats, I am confident about this list:

In each category, the most commonly used words are at the top.

“More” and “milk” just become spoken words in the last week, after many months of signing. 

D recently started signing “Daddy”.  He taps his temple with an index finger, rather than making an open hand tapping the forehead with the thumb. If he wasn’t also saying the word, one might think he was indicating his head. 

We sign and count as we ride the elevator  which is where he gets “two”.  He looks at his hand while saying “two” and tries to fold in the extra three fingers, but can’t seem to do it. 

I’ve been signing and saying water for months, but it just emerged recently with the pronunciation “wa wa”, which I highly expect is something he heard from another kid or adult at his new daycare.  He just signed it today for the first, time although he couldn’t get his fingers in to the “W” shape.

The meanings don’t always line up with adult meanings.  For example, he does say “yellow” and “blue” and he often seems to say them in reference to color, he isn’t consistent or accurate in which colors he labels with them. 

The story of “big” is one of my favorites.  We were hiking in late July and he stood on the trail and spread his arms wide and said “bii” then turned 180 degrees and did it again and again, like he couldn’t get over the size of the forest and the trees.  He probably said it 10 times then, and I haven’t heard it since. 

He has combined a few signs a few time, like “more food”, “siren truck”, “where daddy” and “done pooping”.

It’s been incredible to watch his comprehension grow too.  At times his efforts to learn new words and signs seems very intentional.  At this point, he can apparently hear a word only once and produce it months in the future. 

the state of the vocabulary

D has a pretty good vocabulary for his age (which is almost one).  His intelligible speech really picked up in the middle of March.  It’s really exciting for all of us.

Here’s a list of what he says (that we understand), in descending order of frequency:

• bus – We live in a bus-watcher’s paradise.  He’s been saying it for about a month now and I’m positive he’s using it appropriately.  Sometimes he points too.  He can’t say the /s/ yet, but then if you took away my top teeth, I probably couldn’t say it either.  We’ve recently introduced the sign [BUS] too though we’re not sure he’s noticed it yet.
• bye bye – He loves saying this while waving and revels in the delight it gives to adults.  He says it at farewells, but sometimes waits long enough that the intended recipient is already gone.  Once he starts, he won’t stop though.  He says it in an adorably throaty and confident way.  He started about a month ago and used to say it while looking out the window.  Now he pretty much only says it to people, though not exclusively at the time of partings. It makes trips to the store more interesting.
• book – This one is awesome.  About a month ago he started saying it while looking at books.  At first he said the /k/ but now he doesn’t.  Then I introduced the sign [BOOK] and now he uses it perfectly.  He really loves looking at books now.  At the moment he uses the sign more than the word.
• hi – He said this a few weeks ago and then stopped, but now is back at it and he’s starting to say it appropriately.
• baby – He said this when we visited a new baby in the hospital and now says it frequently though we can’t always tell which baby (if any) he is referring to.  We started signing songs and putting “baby Dx-xx” in the lyrics and he loves it.  He says baby and really seems to wish he could sing it with us.
• ball – This one is pretty recent.  He doesn’t say the /l/ so you have to be listening for it, but he definitely uses it correctly.  We also have introduced the sign [BALL].
• cat – He’s been saying cat (without the /t/) and kitty cat or kitty (first syllable only) for several months.  The /ki/ of kitty is adorably high pitched.  When we read a book about cats he stops to look for Emo.
• Dx – I’m not sure about this one, but when we stand in front of the mirror he says the first syllable of his name while grinning at himself.  He’s recognized his name for several months.
• dad – Along with dada, this has been in his vocabulary for months.  A few months ago he said a nice bye bye dada, but it’s rare and I think he still uses it for more than just the dad concept.
• mom – Phonetically this was a very early word, but I think he still uses it in distress more than to refer to me.  Jack reports that he says it if I’m gone at bedtime and I hear it occasionally when he wants to get out of the high chair right this second.
• more – This is an exciting one.  He’s started signing it and last week he even signed more book very clearly!

Notable for their absence are signs for food and milk, two of our more consistently used ASL signs [post: a few ASL signs].  I guess he’s just not that hungry.

For about three weeks now, he’s been pointing at things which is fun.  He also says “huh?” with very clear rising interrogative intonation.

He’s also started shaking his head when we say no and a few months ago he would stop what he was doing sometime when we said a forceful no.  I assume he still understands but just chooses to ignore us.

a few ASL signs

For the last few months we’ve been trying to do some signs with D.  The idea is that he’ll be able to communicate with signs long before he’ll be able to speak intelligibly.  We would love it if grandparents tried to use these same signs too.    So far we use “milk” and “more” most often and I think he might be understanding them.

These are links to short videos of a few signs.

• milk
• more
• cat
• mom
• dad
• music
• kiss
• happy

dastardly catastrophe: the end of the apostrophe!

Despite having studied linguistics, I’m really not a grammar maven.   Of course, I certainly enjoy listening for speech patterns and I have some pet peeves.  For example, I think the distinction between “you’re” and “your” is really important.

Japanese

Today I noticed that the city added Japanese street signs to all of the streets of the International District, making the previously fuzzy distinction between Pioneer Square and the ID very clear.

language models

At work, I make language models.  This is a little explanation of what a language model is.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

I'm not sure who said this, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Imagine you have a language and you want to be able to predict what words are likely to be strung together.  You need to create a model, which is just a structured representation.  This model will never be perfect, because it will always be incomplete and the way people use language is constantly evolving.  Nevertheless, the idea is that if you get enough data (texts, transcripts etc.) and you represent it intelligently, you'll be able to make a useful model.

An ngram model is a model where you look at a window of n words.  The most basic model would simply count ngrams.    Lets say we want to use a bigram (a 2gram, where the window is 2 words).

We will train the model based on this is our very very short input text:
The quick fox jumped over the candlestick.  The fox then melted down the candlestick and jumped over the moon.

If we just iterate through the text using a window of two, we get the following bigrams:
the quick
quick fox
fox jumped
jumped over
over the
the candlestick
candlestick .
. the
the fox
fox then
then melted
melted down
down the
the candlestick
candlestick and
and jumped
jumped over
over the
the moon
moon .

You'll notice some of them occur more than once.  So we'll add counts to them like this:

1 the quick
1 quick fox
1 fox jumped
2 jumped over
2 over the
2 the candlestick
1 candlestick .
1 . the
1 the fox
1 fox then
1 then melted
1 melted down
1 down the
1 candlestick and
1 and jumped
1 the moon
1 moon .

This is a language model, albeit not a good one because it's not based on enough data.

Now, imagine you're looking over someone's shoulder as she types.  If she types "the", based on this model you'd predict that the next word would be "quick", "candlestick", "fox", or "moon."  Because "the candlestick" occurred twice while the other combinations only occurred once, you'd probably guess "candlestick" if you had to pick just one.  Based on this model, and the much more accurate model in your brain, you wouldn't predict "the and" or "the then" or "the the."

Now you know what an ngram is.  This is a fun Google site where you can see the frequency over time of different ngrams in models created from books.

For example:
trigram "thou art my"
trigram "never say never"