Words, words, words

I've been meaning to make a list of all of Paul's words but I haven't yet and today I realized it's in a way too late--he's moved on to phrases.

We take Sylvia to school on the bus. Paul's been saying bus very distinctly for a while. He's also had a little phrase he says before bus a lot of the time. Today I finally understood he was asking me if that was our bus. When I told him no, he said some different phrase before bus that I'm pretty sure was him repeating the idea that the bus wasn't our bus.

Gads, I'm slow.

I don't know a lot about human development, but it's been clear for a while Paul has more than just words in his vocabulary, that there's a structure to what he's saying. Much of what he says sounds like gibberish to me, but it's consistent gibberish so it's obviously language. I don't know enough about language acquisition to know if he's making up the syntax or if he's trying to copy us more advanced speakers, but it's obvious he knows instinctively there's a structure to talking and he's imitating or creating it himself.

I know I loved watching Sylvia go through this language acquisition phase. It's just as much fun to watch the second time around.