Jorie and language

thette's post about communicating with Hulda reminded me to say something about Jorie's recent language progress.

Jorie seems to make sudden cognitive leaps separated by months. They always catch us by surprise. Recently she had another one, and it only really became apparent once we got back from our trip to Virginia. Her conversation's suddenly become much more creative and interactive, more like an actual conversation than the weird Markov-chain monologues she used to produce. The first thing we noticed, even before the trip, was that she's much more likely to answer questions "yes" or "no" (or "yep" or "nope", usually with what seems to be appropriate intent) instead of just parroting part of the question; the distinction between questions and answers seems to have gotten much more clear to her.

She's become capable of generalization. She recently had a conversation with Sam that somehow got onto Jorie saying "Mommy is the best mommy", "Daddy is the best daddy" and "Jorie is the best Jorie," and then she concluded "We're the best people." I may not agree 100% with the sentiment but the grammatical extrapolation was impressive. (She still doesn't get first- and second-person singular pronouns, however, usually using "I" as a second-person subject and "you" as first-person; lately she refers to herself frequently as "she" or "her", probably because she's become conscious of us talking about her to each other, though she typically uses the subject and object forms with appropriate agreement.)

She's also heavily into spinning new variations on an existing scheme. A couple of days ago, while I was drying her off after a bath, she suddenly started riffing on the book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" with different animals, asking me "kangaroo, kangaroo, what do you see?" I figured the theme was Australian and answered "I see a wombat looking at me," and she ran with that: "Wombat, wombat, what do you see?" and we went on like that for some time.

Nonsense and wordplay are becoming more and more important. She loves doing progressively weirder sound-substitutions, replacing all the vowels in a sentence with the same vowel, beginning every word with a B sound, etc. Mispronounced words that get strange reactions turn into nonsense phrases that she giggles at and repeats for days as running jokes. "Bibble-bi-beable" and "yumps" have had some vogue recently.

While she's been able to count to 10 for several months in the basic sense of reciting numbers in order, she doesn't yet count in the deep sense of being able to make correspondence between numbers and objects, and she hasn't really shown much understanding of number-concepts beyond 1, 2 and many. This week, though, she definitely mastered 3; she can identify groups of three objects and does it every chance she gets. When asked to count more than three objects, she usually says there are five. If there coincidentally happen to be five, this can impress people.