C’est une des petites histoires rigolo qui arrivent avec des jeunes enfants. Pas la nôtre, elle ne sait encore ni parler ni écrire, mais le fils de nos amis, 3½ ans.
Il vient de rentrer en maternelle et sait déjà écrire quelques lettres. Quand récemment, maman et papa lui ont dit d’écrire une lettre au Père Noël, il a gribouillé “A” sur un papier – sa lettre au Père Noël. 🙂

This is one of the funny things that happen with young children.
Not mine, since she’s neither reading nor writing yet, but the 3½-year-old son of our friends. He started pre-school this autumn and already scribbles some letters. So when mommy and daddy recently said he should write a letter to Santa, he proudly wrote “A” on a piece of paper – his letter to Santa. 🙂

Last night, I regretted having neglected the teaching of baby signs, when my little girl cried and cried and wouldn’t stop.
Then her daddy had a great idea: He put her down and let her walk off. Where she went? Straight into the living room and to her high chair.
The message was clear: “I’m hungry!” No matter that it was 11p.m. and she had finished eating all her regular meals during the day.
If we needed more proof than the wide-eyed look as I prepared her bottle, it was the 120ml of milk missing from said bottle when she handed it back to me.
And where did she go then? To her bed. 🙂

Still, I’m looking forward to the days when she can talk.

Yesterday my little girl (16 months and counting) showed her caregiver just how good her comprehension is already:

Both she and the other little girl (J, 12 months) at the caregiver’s were eating a piece of bread. That is, my girl had already finished hers and was eyeing that of little J. More than eyeing actually, and when the caregiver saw her with J’s bread, she was told “No, J’s bread remains in J’s hand.”
Next time she looked, J was holding her piece of bread, but my little girl was holding her hand so that she could eat the bread.

Should she be punished? She obeyed the caregiver’s orders, after all.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich mal eine etwas andere Buchempfehlung machen:

“Lüttjet Platt – Mein erstes Platt-Buch” von Valeska Scholz ist ein ganz herrliches Kartonbilderbuch mit den ersten unumgänglichen Wörtern, die jeder plattschnackende Schietbüdel kennen sollte.

Plattdüütsch ist schließlich eine ganz eigene Sprache (und genausogut wie ein Jodeldiplom ;-))

We never tire of research, it seems. The “BabyLab – LBB” of the Laboratoire Psychologique de la Perception at Paris V – Descartes University still has us in the files (from this participation at 10 months), and this time they were looking for 16-months-old babies.
So we went there for a study on the use of instruments. Apparently, this is an ability that develops between 12 and 18 months. I was told that if you give a 12-months-old a rake with a toy inside, the baby will pull the rake to get the toy. If the toy sits beside the rake, the baby won’t make the connection. At 18 months, however, the baby will use the rake to fetch the toy.
My girl didn’t get a rake but a bunch of strings, one of which was attached to, of all things, a rubber duck. She always picked out the one string attached to the ducky right away.
It was interesting when they showed me the video afterwards that included the tracking of her eye movements.
Apparently only a small minority of their test candidates had been able to pick out the right strings that quickly. 🙂

As their colleagues next door happened to be looking for 16-months-olds too, we moved on. This study was about speech, and if babies can learn a new word in a short time and distinguish it from a similar-sounding one.
So while I had my eyes shut tight to avoid confusing the eye movement tracking device, my girl got to watch a screen where different objects were presented with nonsense names, in pairs that sounded similar. It would go, “This is a pug. Look at the pug. What a nice pug. Look what I’m doing with the pug. I’m putting the pug here.” Then it would disappear and another object would be introduced in the same way as a “puk”. In the end, both objects were visible and the candidate (my girl) was asked to look at the [one of the two].
We went through eight pairs, and she never became impatient. (I did, after about the fifth “What a nice…!”) The researchers said she was the most patient candidate they have ever seen. 🙂 🙂

Both sets of researchers asked if they could keep our contact data for future use. I told them to go ahead. My girl seems to enjoy it just as much as I do. Plus, it gets her used to going to university. 😉

Edited in July 2016 to add a link to the LBB’s newsletter n° 5 which describes a study of bilingual kids (p. 3) that strongly resembles the second study we participated in on this day.

Das Buch zur zweisprachigen Kindererziehung von Barbara Abdelilah-Bauer (www.enfantsbilingues.com und www.cafebilingue.com) ist auch auf Deutsch erschienen, und der Verlag bietet auf seiner Website eine Leseprobe mit der Einleitung und dem ersten Kapitel zum Download an (PDF ca. 660kb).

Ich empfehle die Lektüre zumindest dieser insgesamt zehn Seiten als Einführung ins Thema.

Zum Weiterlesen gibt’s das Buch bei Amazon.de zu kaufen.

…CHEESE!

We haven’t been any more consequential about signing since my previous post on the subject, but then one or two weeks ago I decided spontaneously to introduce a new sign from Baby Signs®:

Since we’ve made a habit of her getting a little cheese between the main course and the dessert at night, and she loves her cheese, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how quickly she picked it up. Today she signed it without me signing first. When she had finished her main course, I just asked what she wanted.

Deutschsprachige Artikel zu dem Thema finde ich nicht so häufig, aber hier ist einer, in der Form eines Interviews mit einer Forscherin des Babysprachlabors an der Universität Konstanz:

“Mehrsprachigkeit hat positive Effekte”

Wir sind die kuh-verrückteste Familie, die ich kenne. Wir haben Kühe in allen Formen, Farben und Größen. Mein Computer und mein Telefon muhen, meine Bettdecke ist schwarz-weiß gefleckt, und unsere Kuhsammlung steht in einem Regal, das bis zur Decke geht. Wir fahren jedes Jahr in die Normandie und gehen mehrmals auf die Landwirtschaftsausstellung.
Unsere Website heißt Cowplanet, und unsere Tochter hat mehr Kühe als irgendwelche andere Kuscheltiere.

Und dennoch:

Die Kuh macht…