Abigail's Words


Abigail is a young baby who is experiencing her world through developing senses. As she grows she may be becoming more aware of what is going on around her. She may even start to decipher the sounds she hears around her: her parents' voices, the murmurs of activity in her home. These noises are being incorporated into her notions of daily life, and she is being introduced to a particular system of language in many ways.

The people around her are communicating with sounds that may begin to sound natural to Abigail. Her parents' voices seem familiar to her and she may notice as they repeat certain sounds when she is eating or playing. They are probably describing her world to her, and are excited for any sign of response from Abigail to their inviting conversations.

Her parents may be reading her some favorite stories and talking about them. Words that are associated with pleasureable experiences may elicit an indication of delight in her activity. As her brain and memory develop, she may begin categorizing the sounds in her head and associating cause-and-effect circumstances with their use.

A fairly common and practiced thought is that young children will initiate sounds in response to repetitious speech or in imitation of sounds they hear. When Abigail speaks, the people around her try to guess what she might be saying by thinking of what words they know that her speech may sound like.

For instance, when Abigail wants her grandpa, she calls for gaga Al. When it's grandma she wants, she asks for gra Joyce. She learns to repeat the sounds of many of her family's names - save for a few key skipped or flipped consonants - and they in turn respond when she calls for each in her own words.

When Abigail first began to speak, her words, like most children, were substantial in her daily experience and consisting of one syllable for the most part. She might easily manuever between closed or open phonemes, such as consonants or vowels, but have trouble finishing the complete sounds. Names like "ma" and "da" for mom and dad, or the beginning sounds for water, baby, or apple, and the self-asserting "no" are common for beginning speakers. Children learn to name others in their world and recognize terms for some of the basic practices in daily life they encounter.

Some of Abigail's first complex words may simply be repetitious in construct, such as "bye-bye" or her own term, "gaga", as seen above. As Abigail's vocabulary grows, she begins putting some common terms together, sometimes first to simply question, such as "where da?" - when her dad is at work, or "no, I!" - when you have just overstepped her independent nature.

Abigail may now be creating more complex sounds, moving from a fairly monosyllabic speech style to one that works with larger words and more interesting concepts. She now tries to repeat entire phrases, and creates her own groups of words that associate with concepts in her experience. These utterances begin to illustrate some of her personality and definitely reflect her sense of humor, which emerges in her facial expressions and other non-verbal communicative devices she has probably learned from experience and watching others.

Like many outgoing young speakers, Abigail has many questions and craves interaction with those around her. She names colors and wants to talk about animals and make their barnyard noises. She loves to pick out books to read together, but is also very content at times to talk and sing to herself when she is entertaining alone.

Abigail also practices counting, and she picks the right sounds despite reversing the pattern alternately - just as she did when she first began to make noise. But now Abigail has a more developed system of language with which to express herself, and she will proudly announce each new advance as it comes with a hearty call:
"5, 6, 2, 3, ... Yay!"