Conversation Gambits

Edith has just screamed 'I don't want to go to bed yet!' at me, or near enough. What she actually actually produced is a six or seven syllable utterance with rising intonation and emphasis on the second and last syllables, which are stretched into a falling cry. 

Even though the language isn't there yet, the intonation, the music of the utterance is spot on and very specifically English. I know this because I often try and get French or Italian students to stretch their syllables for emphasis when I'm teaching intonation, and trust me, they don't like it. So this gets me thinking, how much of these intonation patterns has she learned from us? Sure I don't spend that much time protesting loudly about going to bed. But I'm sure she's listened to plenty of other expressions of protest coming from my mouth. So maybe Edie is tuning in to the forms of discourse first and picking up waveforms. Perhaps there aren't actually that many to learn. 

We have a book in our speaking and listening library called Conversational Gambits By Keller and Warner from the old days of TEFL in 1988. They get to about 60 different gambits in their book split into opening gambits, linking gambits and responding gambits. But you could probably shave it down to a fairly small group of short expressions that Edith must be tuning into and mastering one by one. the protest gambit, well that seems a fairly good place to start, especially when you're a small person and you've got two big people telling you what to do all the time.

A bird in the hand

A very natural progression that, nevertheless, was wonderful in it’s simplicity and timing. It starts with dinner time. We try to let Edith feed herself. She drinks from a plastic cup which is kept out of her reach to avoid her baptising her food and creating a sloppy mess. Just before Christmas, she started pointing at the cup when she needed a drink - the first finger stretched to indicate the desired object. A Particularly useful skill if there was a bottle with milk in it, or a banana just out of reach. The pointing was usually accompanied with a declarative humph. She quickly started to point at other things that weren’t edible things. Her bookshelf was a popular one - a good way indicate ‘I want a story’ (usually when it was bedtime.) 

Then on Christmas day, in the morning, she was sitting in her grandparents living room, on her grand mum’s lap. We were probably opening presents or something boring that had taken the focus off her briefly. She was gazing at the bird feeder, hanging outside the window. A bird landed to peck some seeds, she pointed out of the window and said ‘dere!’ A demonstrative and an  imperative too. Look at that! Look at what I’ve seen! Look at it with me! She was obviously pretty pleased with the effect this had on us because she has been doing it throughout the christmas period since that point, with the occasional addition of ‘dere dada!’ Good alliteration, Dad approves. The birds were a continued source of interest particularly because they flitted in and out, Edith had to wait and look for them carefully. The train window was a pretty exciting prospect as well, everything flashing past. We were on the train to the children’s zoo in Battersea Park. I wouldn’t have thought to take Edith there just a week ago, but now it seemed to provide the perfect ‘look at that, there’ opportunity. Edith definitely enjoyed the occasion, there was lots of finger pointing at meerkats, lemurs and otters (and the other children on the playground.) She might actually understand what those funny animals are in her storybooks now. Why do we populate our storybooks with anthropomorphized animals? Why not throw in the odd sapien? 

Climbing Centre

I love bouldering. I don’t have much time for it at the moment, but I’ll get back to it at some point, especially now my brother is living up in Sheffield – one of the true homes of English climbing. Watching Edith learning to cruise around the furniture & walls of our house over the past few weeks makes me realise that bouldering is just the vertical continuation movement on a horizontal plane, or walking, as we tend to call it. Bouldering is continuing where most humans left off at the age two basically.

So Edith is at the intermediate stage between crawling and walking, which has the unfortunate name of ‘cruising’. I can think of better names ‘finding one’s feet’ seems good – the balance adaptation.  Watching Edith perfect the skills of Bipedalism day-by-day over the last couple of weeks is like watching human evolution on fast-forward. She drives herself through the learning barriers with her emerging muscular and neural development. Initially her whole weight was placed on each object she leant against. Now she moves freely and can balance in quite sophisticated ways against all sorts of surfaces. So our kitchen is her climbing centre. Lucky girl, I’d be a much better climber if I could practice in our kitchen. By the way, Edith is one today. Happy Birthday Edith!  Or as the Espanoles say feliz cumpleaños! (Happy year completion). 

word games

The joke we tell is this: Whenever Edie wants to be entertained she calls 'dadada.' Whenever she actually needs something she'll call 'mamama'. The truth is she has been saying the two sounds, strings of sounds rather than words, for a while now, with different degrees of intention, moving between one and the other. She certainly understands and waits expectantly when I tell her mama is coming. Smiles and waves when she arrives. 

I'm a little concerned that word number three is going to be 'no' or 'nanana.' Actually, there is no doubt that the sound and the message with this word is already programmed in. I know this because she has been practising shaking her head and saying to herself at the same time. Well, you have to say 'no' a lot to an increasingly mobile baby in a little house, simply to avoid trouble and tears. 

Sometimes I think Edie is saying no to herself in a little game. Could she really be imagining something then telling herself that is not permitted. Is that possible or does that sound too complex for an 11 month girl? Perhaps she just enjoys copying the sound or associates the sound with particular places in the house. The funny thing is that she looks all sad and serious when she says it. 

The final piece of language the she has already learned is a gesture. It's the symbol for 'milk'. She gestures using  British sign language and the action is basically that of squeezing an udder. To explain, Amy has been taking her to a song and actions class where they learn lots of gestures like this and we've used it whenever we've been giving her a bottle. It's effective as it's part of the bedtime routine. So now she is using it to remind us at the times she knows she usually gets her milk. She also uses it with me when I give her her evening bottle. She already has the bottle, she takes a drink, then just to remind me that she knows the symbol and to check I wont forget tomorrow, she'll make the gesture again. You can't be too careful when it comes to getting your evening feed

tumble cries

I've been meaning to write about little face (Edith) - but keep putting it off. I wanted to write about her big raspberry period when all she did was blow, well,  you can guess. I planned to write about the weekend she just started sitting up of her own accord. It happened so quickly it even surprised us. Suddenly the muscle was there to support her frame and she was upright surveying the scene from a royal height, looking pleased with herself. 

This was a couple of months ago now. Since then she has turned her sitting position into a more mobile unit, dragging herself around on her bum. It's not crawling yet because she's got one leg stuck under her and one leg splayed out at an angle, but it's definitely movement - I'm pretty sure she knows what she's aiming for. The game goes like this: find an object then throw it so the thing rolls away from her. Then chase it leaning forward onto both hands without falling flat. I noticed that while playing this throw and chase game, she worked her way across the kitchen floor until she was grabbing for the wall.

The one thing she hasn't learned is to sit herself up again if (and when) she does tumble forward. If she reaches the tumble stalemate, then a few frustrated cries bring dad or mum to prop her back up so she can start the game again. This is really both frustration language and command language at the same time. Perhaps all frustration language has a demand for attention contained in it. That's true of most cries of frustration. They pretty much say, "Oi! come over here and give me some sympathy." 

Some Languages

Edith lifts her hands to her face as if to count the number of fingers on each hand. I notice that she is able to turn her eyes right in to focus on the object a few centimetres from her face.  Instead of counting she gargles some dental fricatives. Not any recognisable consonant. It’s her ‘ I’m busy working’ language.

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I’m just back home and Edith is always happy to see me. But she doesn’t like sitting in her high chair much. It’s too much of a bucket seat, and who likes bucket seats, right? She likes to sit upright at the moment, alert and able to look around. So to voice disapproval she lets out an almighty aaaaiiiieeeeeaeaeaeae, her tongue folding itself through the sounds. This is longer, more complex than the usual monophthong cries. This is dissatisfaction language.

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And then at other times I try a conversation.  She will squeak and I’ll squeak back… but nothing. I can try words or sounds but she just listens to me.  She’s not going to interrupt herself thinking. She does not need to sound out her thinking. 

Nappy Dance

I’ve decided to set myself the deadline of writing something – a paragraph at least about Edith’s development every month. It seems she is developing and changing so fast and that the discipline of writing will help me to try and save a memory or a moment regularly.

When Edith was born the community nurse gave us a red book where her weight, 

measurements, and developmental information will all be placed throughout her childhood. One of the pages in the book has illustrations of some of your child’s developmental milestones, and next to the illustrations you can write the age when they first did this thing. Seeing all these changes taking place is a matter of observation, we’ve spent much time discussing the first time we saw Edith lift her neck  fully or the first time she smiled. But the other half of observation is speculation about what we are seeing, how are we to read and interpret the gestures and sounds that Edith makes. Are we right to see them as Edith exhibiting emotions similar to ours, or could we be misinterpreting them?  How similar, or how different is Edith’s world to ours?

I come home and often change Edith’s nappy to give Amy a rest. Edith initially hated having her nappy changed but now she seems to enjoy it, particularly when she can kick and throw her arms around freed from her nappy. This seems to be a time of day when she experiments with movement and with language as well. Cooing, clicking and testing intonations, rolling the tongue around in her mouth, responding to me singing to her, moving my face closer and further away from hers. This is the most exciting time for me, seeing her experimenting and playing with the possibilities of communication. Language seems to bubble up almost unheeded from her.  It combines with a whirlwind of kicks and waves in an energetic horizontal dance.