Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The pronoun game

Ben's speech is becoming more sophisticated all the time. He's speaking in sentences now and even gets a lot of diction and grammar correct. However, we're stuck in Pronoun Limbo. He says the following things a lot:

"Pick you up" (pick me up)
"Take your shoes off" (take my shoes off)
etc.

It makes sense, since I say those things to him but don't often say them about myself. When a kid is first learning to talk, books encourage you to refer to yourself in the third person, so he knows who you are. Well, Ben has "Mommy" and "Daddy" down pat, so now I'm having to get back into the habit of saying "me," "I," and "my" instead of "Mommy's."

These things come so naturally to us as adults, it's easy to forget that we've had decades of practice. This seems ridiculously obvious to type, but language is incredibly complicated and it's interesting to watch someone learn it from scratch.

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