This is not from my girl, but from a friend of hers, not quite a year older, who told her today: “Les pigeons, c’est une espèce qui vole.”

Don’t worry, we didn’t try to find out if our girl is really a girl – we just helped a researcher at the BabyLab of the “Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique” (their website has changed, by the way) in her study of whether 31-months-old toddlers already distinguish between “le” and “la” in the French […]

I just noticed something interesting today. My little girl recently converted to muesli. I bought some fancy ones for kids at mymuesli (which I highly recommend), “Prinzessinnenmüsli” with strawberries and raspberries, and “Piratenmüsli” with tiny white and milk chocolate pieces. My little girl tried them both, and admired the beautifully decorated muesli tins they came […]

Does baby language count as a language? I mean the sort consisting of fixed words (such as “wauwau” for “dog”) that are not real words yet are used os consistently that parents and other regular care-takers will understand them as if they were. In that case, our daughter is making trilingual sentences. “Wauwau pas da?” […]

My little girl is into making sentences these days. They are somewhat lacking articles and prepositions, but you get the idea. Although they are generally in French, German words are being used. A popular expression is “That’s my…” “C’est ma Kuh !” (German, cow, female.) “C’est ma lapin !” (French, bunny, male.) “C’est ma coussin […]

As I mentioned recently, French is becoming the dominant language in my girl’s active vocabulary. Being the bilingualism-obsessed mother that I am, I’ll let you imagine the joy with which I greet exclamations such as the one today in the car: “Papa, c’est grün!” As an aside, this is her mother’s daughter. In my own […]

My little girl has recently taken to comment on the quality of food, distinguishing between “bon” (good) and “pas bon” (not good). So the other day, I asked my little girl if her yoghurt was good: “Ist der Joghurt lecker?” This is the reply I got: “C’est pas pas bon.” Now let’s see: “not not […]

The obvious answer is yes. In a recent study of monolingual French infants aged 20 months, researchers introduced them to new words in a foreign language in an attempt to find out if and how easily they would assimilate them. They came to the conclusion that the results obtained in the study show that 20-months-old […]

Yesterday, at almost 29 months, was a good day for talking: two full sentences! From the shoulders of her dad: “Papa, je veux descendre.” (Daddy, I want to go down.) Discovering the still too-complicated-to-handle Crayola pens on a higher shelf: “Il est là mon crayon!” (That’s where my pen is!)

Our little girl has very few words she actively uses in both languages. Usually, when she has one word, whether German or French or an onomatopoeia (such as “wauwau” for “dog”), she sticks with that, even if she understands perfectly well when we say “Hund” or “chien”. For some strange reason (and to my obvious […]