First Sentence

We’ve received comments that most of the videos of the girls talking features Eleanor. Eleanor and Miranda both talk a lot–they just talk differently. Eleanor likes to answer when we ask what something is, what color it is, what number or letter, etc. It’s a big exercise in naming things. In contrast, Miranda talks in much longer sequences. Much of it started out as babbling. We first noticed it as she spewed a steady stream of syllables while flipping through some books.

Recently, we realized that in many cases Miranda was speaking in Taiwanese, and we just failed to recognize it. For instance, she’ll sometimes point to something and say, in Taiwanese, “what’s this?” I feel bad that she’s probably been doing this for a while, and we’ve been answering her with blank stares. It’s not that we don’t understand Taiwanese–we just haven’t been listening for it in their speech.

Case in point: Miranda was carrying around a doll and a toy bottle with orange liquid the other day and pretending to feed it. I recorded a video of it, and it was only after watching it again that I realized what she was saying. Agnes starts by saying “Baby jah bottle.” Miranda responds with “Juice. Baby jah … juice.” (Jah is my best phonetic representation of the word that means “eat” in Taiwanese.) She was saying that she was feeding the baby juice. It’s a little hard to understand, but she was definitely putting together a whole sentence.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (782KB).]

We assume that Miranda’s Taiwanese and Mandarin (e.g., she says “ant” in Mandarin) vocabulary comes mostly from Agnes’ mother. Since then, we’ve been listening a little more closely.