Linguistics | Katja Patersonová

New sentences

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 20:03:18 +0000

This week we hear new things from Katja:

I watched RA two times.

push me closer.

And what letter is that?

D

Mommy wrote it.

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:45:46 +0000

Today Katja and I were talking about a new mark on the tag of one of her dolls. She said: "Mommy wrote it." That is she used the past tense of an irregular verb! "Me excited!" to use another of her current phrases. This is a phrase I heard yesterday after she said that we needed to get the "ingredients" to make a "birthday cake".

Is and am

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 10:30:16 +0000

Katja has two verbs of note: is and am. Last night we heard “am” for the first time. We heard the response “me am” to “you should be laying on the pillow”. In contrast to new verbs “is” has been a long standing verb of location. “Me is up”, “me is down”, or “me blanket is”. Is is almost exclusively used along side ideas of location. And is often in phrase final position. As in “is mommy?” For something like “where is it mommy?” Whereas “mommy is?” would be “where is mommy?”

It is cute how her language choice evolves. The new lexicon is displayed, the old home speak word diaper, pronunciation evolves. In one way I loath the change. It is sad to loose the old forms. They are often so straightforward and morphology simple. Part of me says I should be recording this speech, but I’ll never review it. Maybe 5-10 minutes of it the night before she gets married. But in reality, not really ever.

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Color terms

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 13:08:45 +0000

I’m not really sure how my daughter started to learn color terms. How does one learn that the word is not a noun (the name of the object) and is the name of a color? I mean think about it as a parent you point to something and say “blue” or “red”. How does the child know that the parent is talking about color?

For about 4 months Katja has correctly identified and labeled blue objects. This is likely due to blue bear being such a prominent part of her life.

I think it was back in June and May that we started coloring with Crayons and writing with pens. This increases the exposure to color terms.

Somewhere along the line we started talking about the colors of the handholds on her climbing wall. I think her second color term about two months ago was “Black”.

“Black” quickly became overshadowed by “pink”. Katja has a special blanket which is pink. But there is her pink backpack, and shoes, and tonnes of other pink things.

Along the way “yellow” has been identified and pronounced in short sessions, like reading curious George. But as a color term has not been a stable self produced word. This may be in part to the challenge Katja has with pronouncing liquids.

This week “green” became a stable word and within a few hours red did too. Though there is a lot of phonological reduction going on right now.

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