Books, Babies, and Babbling

[Author’s note: OD did strange things to bullet points in this entry. My apologies.]

Upcoming Books
I’m excited about this year’s offerings for books, for as much as these three:

June 11 – Elizabeth Moon – Limits of Power, the next installment in the Paladin’s Legacy series.

August 13 – PZ Myers – The Happy Atheist. I’ve read Myers’ blog Pharyngula for years.

September 24 – Richard Dawkins – Childhood, Boyhood, Truth: From African Youth to The Selfish Gene, which I hear is an autobiography of the formative years of Dawkins’ youth.
 
Kindle
I accumulated three $50 gift cards from Ryan and Kat over the last two years from various holidays/birthdays. I decided to obtain a completely frivolous gift for myself, a fancy Kindle. I certainly don’t need a Kindle by any stretch of the imagination, but it was cheap with my $150 discount. Plus, reading books on my iPhone or Meg’s iPad is annoying (the reflective surface, the light shining in my eyes).
 
I’m also curious if I can successfully convert any of my books into MOBI format (the default format for the Kindle). I’d much prefer to read my older writings without having to print them out on my laser printer on A2 paper, an awkwardly large size for reading just about anything resembling a book. So, I’ll experiment about converting my DOCX files into MOBI. I’m always up for a challenge.

It should also prove useful for my trip to La Jolla in April. Nothing more annoying than lugging around five thick books through security.

The Kindle arrives March 14-19.

Buying Books
I’m by no means against buying books, mind you. I have six bookcases split between two rooms in my house, not to mention the stack of books on my bedside table, which is spilling onto the floor like a fast-moving glacier. But when faced with the prospect of buying another book at Barnes & Noble (one of the few bookstores left standing in Tucson), I usually head to the non-fiction section.
 
I don’t pick non-fiction because I prefer reading it, exactly. I just feel an obligation to stock my bookshelves with books of value. I’d feel silly lining shelves with bodice rippers or science fiction. So I tend to buy “serious” books. They stare at me accusingly as I walk past them, asking me if they’ll ever get the chance to be read all the way through.

Perhaps a Kindle will fix my book-buying bias. Or maybe I should just get over it and start buying easy reads.

Audio Books
I’ve been a large fan of audio books the last few years. I load them on my iPhone and walk around the house with headphones in the morning, and play them in the car. I’ve gotten through quite a few books this way.
 
Audio books allow me to do other things than sit still reading. My tolerance for listening to more “serious” books increases with audio books than traditional paper. This is probably because I don’t need to sit still and read. I can clean the kitchen or eat breakfast and still “read.” The experience is altered, naturally; it’s a different process experiencing a book through different media. I suspect that I have “restless leg syndrome” or something similar to a mild form of attention deficit disorder. I do have a devil of a time sometimes when I have to passively sit still and read something. (I hope that my Kindle isn’t a waste of my time for this reason.)

I’ve also had a mental itch disorder of some sort since I was little, where I have a constant itchy feeling between my second and third fingers on both hands, the backside of my wrists, the backs of my knees, and between my second and third toes on both feet. I sometimes squirm around itching myself furiously until I focus my mind on something else. The itch thing doesn’t help when I try to sit still and read a book, unless the book’s engrossing enough for me to focus completely on it. (I suppose I should see a doctor about it, but it’s something I’ve lived with for most of my life, and I suspect, incurable.)

Emma and Language Acquisition
I will probably need to read less with audio books when I’m puttering around home when Emma is born. I need her to learn language, which means I’ll need to talk around her. So I’ll need to talk aloud on the nights when I’m taking care of her alone. I plan on reading to her often, even if she doesn’t fully understand what I’m talking about.

Speaking about language acquisition, my beat up copy of An Introduction to Language by Fromkin and Rodman, gives the following timeline of stages of language acquisition (with parts paraphrased and truncated; my apologies to the authors):
–         
6 months: From around six months, babies begin to lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not phonemic in their language. Japanese infants can no longer hear the difference between [r] and [l], which do not contrast in Japanese, whereas babies in English-speaking homes retain this perception. They have begun to learn the sounds of the language of their parents. Before that, they appear to know the sounds of human language in general.
–         
Babbling. In the first few months, usually around the sixth month, the infant begins to babble. The sounds produced in this period (apart from the continuing stimulus-controlled cries and gurgles) seem to include a large variety of sounds, many of which do not occur in the language of the household.
–         
4-7 months: infants from four to seven months produce a restricted set of phonetic forms, vocally, if exposed to spoken languages, and manually if exposed to signed language, drawn from the set of possible sounds and possible gestures found in spoken and signed languages.
–         
12 months: First Words. Sometime after one year children begin to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to mean the same thing. . . . When they do this varies from child to child and has nothing to do with how intelligent the child is: It is reported that Einstein did not start to speak until three or four. By this time, children have learned that sounds are related to meanings, and they are producing their first words. Most children seem to go through the one word = one sentence stage. Theseone-word “sentences” are called holophrastic sentences (from holo “complete” or “undivided” and phrase “phrase” or “sentence”).
According to some child-language researchers, the words in the holophrastic state serve three major functions: They either are linked with a child’s own action or desire for action ([like saying] “up” to express [a] wish to be picked up), or are used to convey emotion ([e.g.] “no”), or serve a naming function (“Cheerios,” “shoes,” “dog,” and so on).
                At this stage the child uses only one word to express concepts or predications that will later be expressed by complex phrases and sentences.
                Many studies have shown that children in the holophrastic stage can perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce themselves. Therefore, even at this stage, it is not possible to determine the extent of the grammar of the child simply by observing speech production.
–          Up to two years: Children learn a very large number of words. According to some estimates, a child will add a new word to her mental dictionary every two hours.
–         
Two years: Two-Word Stage. Children begin to put two words together. At first these utterances appear to be strings of two of the child’s earlier holophrastic utterances, each word with its own single-pitch contour. Soon, they begin to form actual two-word sentences with clear syntactic and semantic relations. The intonation contour of the two words extends over the whole utterance rather than being separated by a pause between the two words. The following “sentences” illustrate the kinds of patterns that are found in children’s utterances at this stage:
allgone sock       hi Mommy
byebye boat      allgone sticky
more wet            beepbeep bang
it ball                     Katherine sock
dirty sock             here pretty
During the two-word utterance stage there are no syntactic or morphological markers—that is, no inflections for number, person, tense, and so on. Pronouns are rare, although many children use me to refer to themselves, and some children use other pronouns as well.
–      
Telegraph to Infinity. There does not seem to be any three-word sentence stage. When a child starts stringing more than two words together, the utterances may be two, three, four, five words, or longer. Since the age at which children start to produce words and put words together may vary, chronological age is not a good measure of a child’s language development. A child’s mean length of utterances (MLU) rather than chronological age is thus used in the study of language development. That is, children producing utterances that average 2.3 to 3.5 morphemes in length seem to be at the same stage of grammar acquisition, even though one child may be two and another three years old.
The first childhood utterances longer than two words have a special characteristic. The function words (grammatical morphemes) such as to, the, can, is, and so on are missing: only the words that carry the main message—the open-class content words—occur. Children often sound as if they are reading a Western Union message, which is why utterances are sometimes called telegraphic speech.
Cat stand up table
What that?
He play little tune
Andrew want that
Cathy build house
No sit there
–         
1 year 10 months – 2 years 4 months: Grammatical morphemes enter the language of English-speaking children.

Breaking this down from a different source (Wikipedia, hurrah) the acquisition timeline looks like this:
–         
Shortly after birth: baby makes speech sounds
–         
2 months: baby makes cooing sounds (mostly vowel sounds)
–         
4 months: babbling (repetitive consonant-vowel combinations). Babies understand more than they are able to say.
 
–       1-2 years: babies can recognize the correct pronunciation of familiar words. Babies will also use phonological strategies to simplify word pronunciation. Some strategies include repeating the first consonant-vowel in a multisyllable word (‘TV’–> ‘didi’) or deleting unstressed syllables in a multisyllable word (‘banana’–>’nana’). Vocabulary grows to several hundred words. Children start using telegraphic speech, which are two word combinations, for example ‘wet diaper.’
 
–          18-24 months: vocabulary spurt, including fast mapping. Fast mapping is the babies’ ability to learn many new things quickly. The majority of the babies’ new vocabulary consists of object words (nouns) and action words (verbs).
 
–          3-5 years: phonological awareness continues to improve as well as pronunciation. Children usually have difficulty using words correctly. Children experience many problems such as underextensions, taking a general word and applying it specifically (for example, ‘blankie’) and overextensions, taking a specific word and applying it too generally (example, ‘car’ for ‘van’). However, children coin words to fill in for words not yet learned (for example, someone is a cooker rather than a chef because a child will not know what a chef is). Children can also understand metaphors. At around 3 years, children engage in simple sentences, which are 3 word sentences. Simple sentences follow adult rules and get refined gradually. Grammatical morphemes get added as these simple sentences start to emerge. Children continue to add grammatical morphemes and gradually produce complex grammatical structures.
–       
   6–10 years: children can master syllable stress patterns which helps distinguish slight differences between similar words. Children can understand meanings of words based on their definitions. They also are able to appreciate the multiple meanings of words and use words precisely through metaphors and puns. Fast mapping continues. Children refine the complex grammatical structures such as passive voice.

It’ll be interesting to map Emma’s language development through the stages of language acquisition. A (very) rough estimate of when these stages will occur:
–         
Cooing: September 2013.
–         
Babbling: November 2013-January 2014.
–         
First Words/Holophrastic Sentences: July 2014
–         
Telegraphic Speech/Two-Word Stage: July 2015
–         
Refined Speech/More Grammatical Speech: July 2016-July 2018

Then again, as the book warns, I should measure Emma’s speech in terms of mean length of utterances (MLU), since every child’s language acquisition can be chronologically different. (MLUs are calculated by collecting 100 utterances spoken by a child and dividing the number of morphemes by the number of utterances. A higher MLU is taken to indicate a higher level of language proficiency.)