ok, I promised happy and fun

[seborn]

And our DangerBoy is frequently both!

I am realizing that with age and wisdom, DangerBoy is not necessarily the most accurate name, but it's silly to keep changing. He is actually FollowingRulesLad at this point, and dutifully stays on the sidewalk (and objects when characters in books do not), mostly keeps out of puddles without his boots on,

Comments

[topologist]

He is currently wrestling with pronouns, and will use i/you/me/my in the same sentence as each other to refer to himself.

Children also do this with conjunctions, happily using, for example, because to simply mean and. It's like they understand what pronouns and conjunctions do grammatically, but have trouble assigning actual meanings to the function words.

Another interesting (well, I think it's interesting, at least) thing about pronouns in language acquisition is that reflexive pronouns take a fairly long time to figure out completely. By age ~3, children usually figure out the rules for reflexive pronouns and can understand and produce sentences involving with them without generating errors like "John hit myself" or "I hit me." The other half of it, that non-reflexive pronouns have to be free (as opposed to reflexive pronouns, which have to be bound) in their domain, doesn't seem to be picked up until about age 6. Only about 50% of 5- to 6-year-old children can correctly parse statements like, "This is Mama Bear; this is Goldilocks. Is Mama Bear touching her?" and infer that the question is asking whether Mama Bear is touching Goldilocks, not whether Mama Bear is touching Mama Bear. (In English, anyway. This difficulty doesn't show up in languages like Italian and Spanish, due to some technical details about the status of pronouns in those languages.) It's strange.

[seborn]

I'd noticed him using reflexive pronouns, and creating the proper reflexive pronoun Dangerboyself. I hadn't been listening closely enough before you mentioned this to notice that he uses them almost entirely in the context of "x does y all by x-self". Which is a vital stock phrase for toddlers. I heard him using "myself" for "me" twice yesterday, and no other reflexive pronoun use. I'm going to keep listening harder now to see when he gets it, thanks!

oh, because. He's learned that why questions get answers starting with because, but since he doesn't quite get why yet, it's more "because... ." "Why is Anna going to the store?" "Because... onna bus." Then again, most "why" questions, like "Why are you putting that spoon on your head?" don't make a lot of sense to ask.