hee hee, our wee one has decided that the pot that the toothbrushes are kept in is called the "borest". she has had other made-up words too but can´t remember them now, drat knew i should have written them down! i just assumed all kids do this - i find it slightly odd that a doctor has recommended speech therapy... nor does a hearing test particularly make sense to me; the jump from airplane (or flugzeug) to dow doesn´t suggest mis-hearing. it seems reasonable to me that when a child becomes aware that there are more than one language in the world, that they should experiment with making up words to see if they work, so it´s potentially really something quite creative and a positive developmental step. and if you can figure out what they mean then i would think it´s quite fun to play along - when they get older you´ll be able to laugh at happy memories of silly words! good luck ian Tue Aug 5, 2008 7:56 am (PDT)
Hi, Sarah. I know exactly what you were talking about. Our daughter is 2 1/2 yrs. old and we having been signing and speaking English and Cantonese to her (OPOL). She understands both languages well and uses both. But I noticed that she consistently uses some sounds for a few words that are neither English nor Cantonese. For example, she makes up the sound "aat" for "sleep", "telephone" and "sheep", which does not resemble either the English or the Cantonese equivalents. If she does not sign, we would have to guess what she means. Like your son, she also seems to be conversing "fluently" with sounds that make no sense to us, with some English or Cantonese phrases popping up occasionally. What we do is we would pick up those words we understand, try to guess what she is talking about and engage ourselves in the "conversation" , e.g. "Really? The telephone is kaputt?" Another bilingual toddler that we know does the same thing. Hope this helps. Ming (Mommy of Penny Laine) --- In multilingualmunchki [EMAIL PROTECTED] com, "simcocse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] .> wrote: > > Hello all, > > I am writing again about my son who is now 22 months. I speak to him in > english and his father speaks to him in german. We live in the states. > My son speaks, but it truley makes no sense. He puts a bunch of sounds > together and in the whole group of sounds he might use on word that I > can undetstand. He also makes up his own words for things. He calls an > aiplane a dow, and lawnmowers nanoos, and water is lalu just to name a > few. I went to the doctor and she ordered a hearing test and gave me > number to call for speech therapy. Is anyone else going through this or > have any ideas. > > Thank you so much, > > Sara > Bilingual Kid? Learn Spanish! Sherlock Holmes podcast
