One of the most amazing things about watching a toddler grow and develop is watching their language and comprehension skills emerge. I never realized until I became a mom how absolutely fascinating something like that could be. It seems like Dylan has been talking a lot for a while, but I know that it has not been that long because he is only about twenty seven months old.
Perhaps I have been thinking a lot about language development lately because Dylan is going through an intellectual growth spurt, which is common for children to experience at about his age. It could also be that in a month, we will be welcoming a baby boy into our family and newborns communicate in an entirely different way. It is simply amazing how over such a short period of time, children go from knowing no words to knowing two or three simple words like “dada” and “mama” to knowing many words.
Even more fun is when they start using words, putting words together into phrases and then into sentences and stories. Oh, and let’s not forget the “parrot” thing – toddlers will repeat just about anything, and it is especially amusing when they repeat the biggest word out of what you just said without having a clue what it means. For example, last week, Dylan began running around the house saying “accomplishment”. I thought that it was quite the accomplishment, even though he may not know what it means.
Right along with learning words comes the adorable mispronunciation of some of them. Fortunately, we have not experienced any mispronunciations that result in it sounding like he is saying bad words. Yet. I used to babysit a sweet little two year old boy and right about when he was beginning to get into the three word phrase thing, we saw a dump truck on the street when we were outside. The phrase that he got from that experience was “big truck working”. As many parents have realized, “tr” is a difficult sound for many children to get out so “truck” is commonly mispronounced.
There are so many fun and rewarding things to experience as your toddler learns how to speak and to understand language. Do you have any funny “toddler talk” stories?
