What I Learned This Week ...

I am taking a language development class. Keep reading ... I promise this post is mildly fascinating.

We were learning about stress syllables this week, and how babies and toddlers use stress syllables to begin learning the rules of the language that they hear. In the English language most two-syllable words are stressed: STRONG, weak ... like AFter or DAddy.

Get the idea ... here comes the cool part ...

When toddlers are learning to talk they take the strong syllable and duplicate it. This means that DAddy becomes DADA and BOttle becomes BABA. Now imagine a three-syllable word like banana- the stress emphasis is: weak, STRONG, weak. So we say it: baNAna. And even with three syllables toddlers still pick up on the strong syllable and duplicate it, turning baNAna into NANA!

Fascinating right!?! Pay attention to the way a toddler talks the next time you are around one- they are learning all kinds of amazing language skills!