December 8, 2003 - Monday
This morning I got near incontrovertible proof that vocabulary and language understanding are two different things and that for a toddler facility in one does not necessarily dictate the other.

I've often noted that Jeremy is some six months or so behind where Harry was in learning to talk. Actually, I've said he's behind in learning "language" and that may not be true. He clearly doesn't speak as clearly as Harry did at his second birthday, but I've often been struck by the possibility that he might understand as much. I still don't know whether that's true, but today I heard Jeremy confuse "you" and "me" and then immediately correct himself and that is very much something that Harry was doing around his second birthday. In fact, I might say that Jeremy corrected himself a lot quicker than I remember Harry doing.

Jeremy got up too late to have breakfast at home this morning, particularly since feeding Jeremy is something that Mary is always happy to do. So, on the way from Mary's driveway up to her house I asked Jeremy the somewhat rhetorical question of whether he were hungry and if he thought Mary ought to give him some cereal.

"Mia -ry give you...give me...chee-os," he said, correcting himself very quickly. Interestingly, I remembering trying to explain the whole "you-me" pronoun thing to Harry on more than one occasion and here's Jeremy more or less on top of it before I really had any idea that his speech had moved past nouns and basic verbs.

Fascinating.


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