In an average sense, children learn to walk and to say their first words at about the same time, but a friend recently remarked to me that the kids she knew either walked first or talked first, rather than doing both simultaneously. I have no idea whether this is true statistically, but it certainly seems plausible. Walking and talking are such complicated and multi-faceted challenges that it seems hard to imagine anyone, even a 1-year old, having the mental energy to learn both at once.
In this divide, Ellie is definitely a walker. As soon as she got over the shock of her new, big-nosed parents, she focused all of her energy on learning to walk. She took her first unassisted steps a month later, just before her first birthday, and during the two months (13 and 14) that she spent in Paris she walked as much as we would let her. By now she can traverse complicated terrain, walk backwards, spin around, climb onto chairs and up steps, and run (with a flailing of arms that seems, miraculously, to keep her upright). Just shy of 16 months, Ellie has largely mastered the peculiar art of, as Laurie Anderson puts it, "falling forward, and then catching yourself from falling." No doubt there are many falls without catches still ahead, but Ellie can reasonably be described as a proficient walker.
By contrast, Ellie says only a handful of words that we understand, and several of those are new in the past week. Nonetheless, she understands quite a lot of what we say, and her language is at an interesting enough state that it seems worth recording something about it, before we can no longer remember life without her constantly chattering. (We can't entirely predict, of course, but she seems like a child who will have plenty to say and will not hesitate to say it.)
As we think about Ellie trying to learn language from her interactions with us, it seems like a nearly impossible task. Never mind that she must pick up syntax, pronouns, conjugation, and irregular verbs, and will somehow pull all of that out of the air by the time she is three. For now, just making sense of the inconsistent ways that we use words --- indeed, divining that there is any sense behind them at all --- is challenge enough. Take "goldfish," for example. In her experience, it refers to (a) a picture of a goldfish in her Baby Animals book, (b) the beautiful but abstract goldfish kite that we bought in Guangzhou and now hangs on her bedroom wall, (c) the fish in Steve and Ruthie's pond, (d) a bath toy that squirts water at her, and, most importantly, (e) her favorite snack food. In similar fashion, "the moon" is (a) the yellow circle on her favorite page of her favorite book ("nine dogs, on a moonlit night --- aaaaaaaooooooooooooooooooo!"), (b) the plush blue crescent that hangs from the ceiling of her bedroom, which she enjoys poking at with a drum stick, (c) the giant ball of cheese that Wallace & Gromit visit in the film "A Grand Day Out" (not quite up there with the Teletubbies in top-rated videos, but watched now and again with forebearance and occasional interest). And oh yes, (d) something in the night sky, though this has probably only been pointed out to her a couple of times and therefore doesn't compete with (a)-(c).
Despite these bewilderments, we can tell that Ellie has learned the meaning of quite a few words by now, including:
Hello, goodbye, bonjour, au revoir -- Waving to "say goodbye" or "dit au revoir" was our first indication that she was really understanding anything we were saying.
Shoes -- and the more specialized term, "squeaky shoes" (from Guangzhou), which she delights in padding around the house in.
Tete, nez -- a holdover from her French Teletubbies tape featuring the French version of "head, shoulders, knees and toes ..." She picked up head and nose, but not the intermediate body parts.
Where's -- At first, "Where's Ellie?" was probably just understood as a whole phrase, but now she has the idea that "Where's the soccer ball?", "Where's your train?", "Where are your shoes?", and so forth are her cue to point and make an excited exclamation. Sometimes she will even go get whatever has been asked for, but this usually takes several gesturally amplified repetitions of "Can you bring [it, them] to me?" Of course, Ellie's ability to answer "where is" questions is our main way of telling whether she understands a word.
Ellie also now recognizes more generally that a rising vocal intonation indicates a question, and that she should come up with some sort of answer in order to earn applause or other forms of adulation. If she can't figure out what the question is, she will usually tap herself on the head, in the hope that the question is either "Ou est ta tete?" or "Where's your head?". This answer at least earns a laugh.
Train -- a small, battery powered, 2-car train that is still holding on to the status of favorite toy, though by a narrowing margin.
Soccer ball, airplane ball -- the latter being a clear plastic ball given to us by our Paris neighbor, inside of which a bear rides in an airplane that pivots to stay right side up as the ball rolls (pretty cool). Whether Ellie understands "ball" itself as a generic term is not so clear, though she probably does.
Eiffel Tower -- meaning her inflatable, plastic, 2-foot high replica. She's seen the original but didn't pay much attention to it.
Duck -- At one point this referred to the live animal, but now that we no longer live down the block from the Luxembourg Gardens fountain, it refers to the wooden duck on a pole that she pushes around the house and yard.
Book -- If we ask "do you want to read a book?", she will usually toddle over to her bookshelf and pick one out, though her attention span doesn't always last through to the end.
Dog (live animal), Cassie (a specific instance thereof, who lives next door), puppy (plastic toy), hippo (puppet), orangutan (picture in book and on Daddy's zoo tee-shirt, possibly connected in her mind to the live animal she has seen in the zoo), dolphin (picture in book), zebra (stuffed animal), giraffe (a fantastically cute Halloween costume given by Grandma Sue -- she likes the suit but so far refuses to wear the hood and is therefore likely to trick-or-treat as Ellie the *headless* giraffe), cat (live animal), turtle (plastic bath/pool toys), jaguar (wooden mask that hangs on the wall of our dining room), pufferfish (squeezable plastic toy), and other representatives of the animal kingdom.
Poussette --- a.k.a. stroller.
Sippy cup.
Teletubbies.
... and lots of other nouns. Moving to verbs and other more abstract sorts of words:
Dance -- Ellie loves to dance, though for now that mostly means bobbing up and down while bending her knees, with occasional foot stomping and arm waving. She clearly enjoys music a lot. At present, a future as a classical violinist looks less likely than drummer in a punk band.
Spin -- the latest addition to her walk/dance repertoire.
Go -- If Ellie is tired of where we are, she reacts quickly to the word "go", waving goodbye to whomever we happen to be visiting.
On/off -- mainly in reference to light switches.
No -- Admittedly, if we had only her reactions to our saying "no" to go on, we would have little evidence that Ellie understands the word, but she has mastered shaking her head, and it's clear that *she* knows this means refusal or disapproval. (Well, most of the time. Sometimes she just enjoys shaking her head no, even though she really wants whatever is being proffered, and sometimes she shakes her head as an acknowledgment that we have said no, even if she has no intention of stopping what she is doing.)
Ellie probably understands a good deal more than this, but it's not always easy to tell. Her speaking vocabulary is more limited. Only now that we have a child do we realize just how ambiguous the idea of "first word" really is. Does "Dada" count if she says it all the time, in reference to just about anything, and usually as part of a longer string of "Dadadadadada"? We think not. What about "wee", first as in "this little piggie went 'wee, wee, wee' all the way home" and then as a generic exclamation when throwing balls, blocks, food, etc.? Seems not quite wordy enough. And what about a word that gets said properly in context a few times but then vanishes? (She seemed to be close to "duck" at one point, but we haven't heard it in the last few weeks.)
The first clear case of a word that Ellie says repeatedly in proper context is "Hi", learned from her favorite song. The focused effort she puts into aspirating the "H" is delightful. In the last couple of days, she has turned this talent for H's to "hot", in reference to Daddy's cup of coffee, to the oven still warm from heating bread, to a slice of pizza she is palming, to a step heated by the sun, and to a carton of ice cream (a reminder that the sensations of "hot" and "cold" have a lot in common).
For the last couple of weeks, Ellie's most common word has been something like DEEEEDOOOUUUUH, usually said with great emphasis and often accompanied by pointing. She can morph this word into others with varying degrees of persuasiveness. She does a pretty convincing "turtle" (TUUUURTUUUULL), an occasionally convincing "doggie", something that could plausibly be interpreted as Daddy, and on a couple of occasions something that appears to be "did it."
In just the last few days, Ellie seems to have gotten the hang of imitating our sounds, so we think that her list of words is likely to grow rapidly. In addition to the popular "hi", "hot", "wee", and "turtle", we've heard "Eiffel tower", "glasses", and "coaster". But Ellie's greatest verbal triumph is something we have only heard second hand, and it is an illuminating look at how much she is picking up without our knowing. The other day, Daddy was at the astronomy department's morning coffee, and Ellie was entertaining the astronomy department office staff (and vice versa). After teaching one of the secretaries how to spin around in a circle, Ellie reportedly complimented her on her achievement by saying "Good job."