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Soren's Referential Words

Soren has learned two new words this past week: "soos" (shoes) and "duht" (duck). These words serve a very different purpose from all the other words that he knows--and I hope they are the beginning of a trend!

All of his other words are very expressive. He uses them to tell us how he is feeling or what he wants. In his previous lexicon, there were words to convey happiness ("hi"), amusement ("aht" and "doh"), desire ("juz" and "eee"), or abject misery ("nono" and "mama").

But these new words he uses simply for the joy of naming something.

With pride, he points out birds at the park and says "duht". He gets just as much pleasure out of holding aloft his toy duck at home. He also identifies his toy penguin as a "duht". I think that's rather clever since we didn't teach him that at all.

And whenever we put his shoes on or take them off, he repeats over and over (while kicking his feet and making the task impossible) "soos soos sooos".

He doesn't know the names for very many more things, but I suspect he will very soon. He is very excited all of a sudden about pointing to and holding up things, then waiting until I give him the name. He usually doesn't copy them back, he just receives the name and goes to find something else. I imagine him storing all those words away for future use and expect that they will come out in a torrent soon.

It will be very exciting.

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