Start Making Sense

Armin A. Brott, author of my favorite series of books on fatherhood, explains in Fathering Your Toddler what's going on with a baby's verbal development at the 12-15 month stage. "According to psychologist Fitzhugh Dodson, there are two phases of language learning: passive (what you understand) and active (what you can actually say). Most of the language learning your toddler will do over the course of the next twelve months will be passive. She understands anywhere from two to a hundred words now and will try to increase that by pointing to everything in sight and asking you to tell her what it is. ...she'll identify upon request her shoes, clothes, body parts; familiar people and objects; and pictures from a favorite book. Although she has a speaking vocabulary of fewer than 10 words, she'll use them whenever she has the chance, pointing to and naming whatever she sees. Multi syllabic words may give her some trouble but by fifteen months she'll be stringing words together two at a time. .. she can also do some pretty good cow, dog, and cat imitations. She's becoming aware of the expressive function of language and has developed an uncanny ability to pick out - and endlessly repeat - the one swear word you accidentally slipped into a ten-minute-long conversation. Her understanding of the symbolic use of words is growing. If she knows the word ball, for example, she may use it when she sees a globe, a coin, an egg, or the moon."