first words

[Margaret Fleck]

A few quick anecdotes and comments to add to the mix.

Recognizability of an early, mangled word depends not only on context and consonants,
but sometimes also critically on the vowels, stress/intonation pattern and the word's
position in the lexicon.  For example, "thank you" (one of my third child's earlier
words) is easily recognized in the form ['d ae_nasal d oo].  There simply isn't
anything else that it could be.

On the other hand, at 20 months he has a word [d ah p] whose identity I still can't
pin down.   It's a verb that means something like "stomp", but there's quite a lot of
verbs with similar meanings and similar phonetics in the English lexicon.   Or maybe
he means to say different ones of these verbs at different times, and they are all coming
out as [d ah p].   Who knows?

His third word, after "mamamama" and "dadadada", by the way, was "kitty" ['ih y iy].   I
had to hear it MANY times around the cat, and not in other contexts, before I was sure of what
it was.  Whether you pick up things like that depends on how much attention you are paying:
my husband never noticed the word until I pointed it out to him.

> So the sign MILK in ASL and BSL often is made with a repetitive open and closing of a fist hand.
> This is a common gesture in hearing children with no exposure to sign language (Volterra and
> Erting 1990).

One small reason for caution here:   US hearing babies (or babies thought to be hearing) are 
routinely TAUGHT the rather similar "byebye" gesture (open and close a fist with the fingers
uppermost) by daycare teachers (probably also other caregivers).   E.g. they sometimes actually
hold the little hand and move it appropriately, as the parent leaves the room.   That particular
gesture is neither spontanteous, nor learned by merely observing others.

Cheers,

Margaret