Eliza turned 20 months old today to little fanfare. She went to the playground with her babysitter, Aartie; helped Cathleen make a tamale pie for dinner; and splashed water on me as I bathed her before bedtime. All the while, no doubt, she was talking up a storm. The standard language development of a 20-month-old child is 15-20 words. While it is not uncommon for a child to possess a vocabulary larger than 20 words at this age, that's the baseline you should be expecting if your child is developing along a standard trajectory. At dinner the other night, Cathleen and I figured that Eliza probably has a working vocabulary exceeding 100 words. If we sat down and listed the words that she completely commands, I suspect she's closer to 150 or more. On top of that, she speaks in two and three-word sentences (again, not uncommon, though the regularity with which she does impresses me), and she asks questions appropriately -- not just "what Max doing?" or "where Mommy going?" but she's even asked "why" in its proper context, a pretty heady concept for her age, methinks. Always question authority, little girl, always.
On the one hand, it makes a certain sense that a lawyer and a writer -- and a couple of Chatty Kathys, at that -- would produce kids that were language-accelerated (Max, too, for the record, was an early and advanced talker), but I can't deny the role that chance plays in it all, and I am awed by the smallest of achievements, linguistically or not, that she displays on a daily basis.
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