David's Daily Diversions

Get Tongue Untied

Mrs H and I had begun to worry a bit because Aidie seemed to have plateaued in his speech. We could see where it would be a social disadvantage if he never progressed beyond nouns ending in vowel sounds.

In the last few days, he has been moving ahead by leaps and bounds. It started with ending consonants. "Lie" has now become "light" and "tray" has turned into "train". He still can't get the "k" sound, which is invariably converted to a "t". I'm sure the "k" with come along and in the meantime we understand him. It is only embarrassing when he is identifying the many felines that live around us, because obviously he can't say "kitty".

The most amazing thing to observe has been the sudden emergence of counting. I wasn't expecting this before the age of two. He doesn't have true number sense, but he knows the order of the numbers in a verbal sense. He seems to have picked this up almost instantaneously. He knows the number names all go together, because when we do counting, he may stray to various numbers out of order, but he doesn't stray to random nouns. He can go to thirteen so far, though Mrs H prefers to concentrate on the first ten.

The boy may have potential yet.