JULIANOTES
                   NINE TO TWENTY-FOUR MONTHS


                     Elizabeth Bates, Mommy
                      in collaboration with
                     George Carnevale, Daddy


What follows is a computer log of observations and  anecdotes  on
cognitive   and   communicative   development,   with  particular
reference to  language  and  gesture.   These  observations  were
collected  by  the parents of one child across a one year period.
They were not collected systematically, and do not  meet  current
criteria   for   an   objective,  scientific  study  of  language
development.

                          JULIANOTES 1

Julia was born March 23, 1983, at 3:45 a.m., by caesarian section
after a 24 hour non-progressive labor; she weighed in at exactly 8.5
pounds, just under 21 inches long.  Monitoring indicated she had done
fine throughout, and she was extraordinarily alert at birth.  The
nurses all commented to George and to me that both her physical
strength (i.e. holding up her head and looking around) and her
alertness were remarkable.  We began the relationship staring into
each others eyes, and continued this kind of intense eye contact in
the hospital, in the much-interrupted periods in the middle of the
night that constitute the official parody of "rooming in".

I made a decision early on not to carry out systematic recording of
Julia--a decision based less on ideology than on a realistic
assessment of my degree of disorganization.  I've quickly learned,
however, that as a writer and teacher I inevitably fall back on my own
anecdotes to illustrate points.  To keep me honest at least in that
regard, I have decided to record a few notes of her communicative and
cognitive progress.

My first impression, other than amazement at her alertness, was
amazement at her incompetence.  The recent literature on infant
development is filled with recounts of how much more a baby can see,
hear, discriminate, expect, predict, etc. than we ever thought.  Such
findings are invariably accompanied by resounding critiques of Piaget,
who attributes so little to the child in the way of an initial
behavioral endowment.  Note however that these studies are always
based on group data, and the effects are usually fragile at best.
Observing my own child, in natural settings, I became a born-again
Piagetian.  The simplest discoveries, e.g.  how to bring hand to
mouth, seemed to take many weeks, apparent successes followed by days
of backsliding.  The one "new wave" experiment that I did try, with
some success, was elicitation of tongue thrusts in the first few days,
in apparent imitation of my own.  I don't know what it means, but the
phenomenon seems real to me now.

Julia was a fussy infant, qualifying as "colicky" by 3 weeks of age.
We learned how to fend off attacks with a mechanical swing, trips in
the car, and constant attention, but it was exhausting.  I became
convinced that the "ragged nerves" theory of colic has more substance
than the stomach ache theory, in any case.  Motor development
proceeded apace: at eight weeks, in a visit to LA to see Jane in
transit, Julia turned from her stomach to her back (but not
vice-versa-- unfortunately so, since she could at that time only fall
asleep on her stomach).

I had been complaining about her disinterest in toys and objects,
looking forward to the day when she could be distracted by a
non-social stimulus.  At 7 weeks, right after one of my complaints,
she sat on a colleague's lap and stared and poked at his watch for 5 -
10 minutes, thereby disqualifying me forever as a sensitive observor.

Although there were no examples of vocal imitation before 12 weeks,
Julia was very vocal: cooing sounds and various vowels, as the
literature would suggest.  In addition, she discovered a curious
scheme of making sounds while inhaling, i.e. "talking inside out",
which lasted for several weeks.

Despite the fussiness, Julia also smiled early: clear exogenous
smiling between 3 - 4 weeks.  In fact, we almost came to dread the big
smiles, because they seemed to involve so much excitement that major
crying was almost sure to follow.  Fortunately, this association
disappeared by the time we left for Italy, when Julia was 11 weeks
old.

We had certainly dreaded the plane trip, but it went quite smoothly:
she socialized with everyone before and after a 6-hour nap.  Before
Rome, we were at Lake Como where I played full-time Mama while George
attended a physics conference.  Alone with Julia all day, I may have
experimented more--or perhaps the changes were inevitable and
unaffected by my presence.  In any case, two things happened: (1) The
first week there, Julia began to respond to vocal imitation, so that
volleys of vocalization up to 12 turns long took place for several
days- -only to disappear with essentially NO other signs of imitation
for many months to come; (2) Sitting in her swing, she began to reach
for objects on her tray: successful one day, she returned to her swing
the next day and now tried to reach them with her mouth, apparently
unable to recall the successes of the day before.  However, by the
time we took the long car trip to Rome (between lusty bouts of
crying), she delighted in tearing up pieces of paper, and picking up
and holding objects with considerably more success.  I had discovered
a few meagre moments of handwatching during this period; nothing more,
ever again.


I do have one particularly clear and poignant memory during the Como
trip.  We went on a long ride around the lake one afternoon (alas cars
stopped calming her once we got to Italy-- whether there bears a cause
and effect relationship to Italian traffic I will never know).  To
calm her crying, I tried singing, inventing a litany-like song with
all her nicknames in alphabetical order as follows: "Little (bunny),
little (bunny), J(B), Julia (bunny)."  The song did indeed seem to
help--and has ever since.  At one point I stopped the car before a
tunnel, to make sure the lights were working.  Julia, whose carseat
was placed facing backward in the front seat so I could watch her,
began to smile excitedly as we pulled over.  When I started the car
again, she cried in what did sound for all the world like
heartbreaking disappointment.  It was clear to me that she thought I
was stopping to play with her; somehow I think her new need/longing
for face-to-face interaction had something to do with her new dislike
for cars.

Several changes occurred in Rome during our six week stay.  We drove
into town on her 3- month birthday, and just as Spock had promised,
Julia ceased to be a fussy baby that very day.  During the Italian
visit, she was bombarded with stimulation: new babysitters, long walks
in town with constant attention from strangers, trips to restaurants.
She became even more social, smiling at everyone without prejudice.
One of the rare exceptions was a brief but severe upset after touching
friend Anthony's rough face with a day's growth of beard--a clear
contrast to both her own father's long beard and the smooth faces of
women.

The Roman babysitter discovered two things that I initially refused to
believe until I saw them: (1) on seeing the frontpack, she became very
excited, in apparent anticipation of a walk to come; (2) approaching
or near the swing, she would occasionally lean and reach toward it.


The "ciuccio" or pacifier was her constant companion in this era, and
she became better and better at retrieving it (but still much slower
than I ever would have believed, given its ubiquity).

 Although Julia became much prettier than she had initially promised
to be, people continued to comment above all on her surprising
alertness and apparent intelligence, and on her straight, strong
little back (Italians believe that infants are supposed to remain
horizontal at all times until 5 - 6 months of age, and they were both
fascinated and appalled by our frontpack).  Toward the end of our
stay, Julia became quite accomplished at sitting with support, and
even without support for brief periods.

Her life changed considerably after our return.  At five months she
began going fulltime to a babysitter, Cindy, and taking one
supplementary bottle per day.  Neither George nor I had any success
getting her to take the bottle; Cindy succeeded the first day, with no
problems thereafter (thus initiating a trend that would be seen again
in many forms....).  At six months we began solid foods (she still did
not sleep through the night, nor would she before 8-9 months of age,
but we hoped fervently that cereal would help).  After a few days of
enjoying the novelty, she began to resist being fed- -her pattern ever
since.  From seven months on, we stopped trying, and let her feed
herself what she would in finger foods.  Fine movements of the hand
were by now excellent, a delicate pincer grasp, thumb and forefinger,
that enabled her to pick up crumbs as well as more dangerous objects.

Pulling to a stand occurred around 6 months, in the crib, proudly
recorded on Polaroid film.  Although she had gotten up on all fours
and rocked in frustration from 4 months of age, she did not crawl
until her 7 month birthday-- whereupon she crossed an entire room,
heading for electric wires.  We tried her out in a walker around this
time, and she quickly figured out how to use it to move backward--but
she couldn't seem to master forward motion.


When Julia had been crawling for less than a month, we had one episode
that seemed to show surprising "maze memory" (if not representation).
She had been carried into the back study, but had never attempted such
a long trip herself.  One afternoon she began whining while sitting
with George in the living room, and started a long and apparently
quite deliberate journey through the hall, the kitchen, and down the
back hall aiming directly at the study (where she had seen me an hour
before), whereupon I heard her approaching whines and came out to
greet her.  Something similar happened a couple of weeks later in
Holland, when she had been left in a strange house to "sleep"
surrounded by mountains of sofa pillows meant to create a safe
barrier.  While we adults sat in the living room and talked, she
managed to surmount the obstacles and follow our voices through two
rooms until she found us.  "Lassie come home."

We bought Julia her first "non-edible" book around 6 months, a book
about a caterpillar, with holes of various sizes for inserting
fingers.  Her patience and interest in the book surprised us, and we
bought several more the next week.  There was a linear increase in
book interest from that time forward; by 8 months she even seemed to
follow my pointing from one figure to another.

Between six and seven months, I carried out a modest and unsystematic
amount of Piagetian cognitive testing.  Removal of one screen to
retrieve an object seemed clear at this point; with more than one
screen, I'm not sure whether it was Julia or the Experimenter who
became confused.  In a restaurant, in her portable chair, she gave a
virtuoso performance on means-end relations: pulling in an object on a
cloth support, by a horizontal string, and on one trial with a
vertical string pulled up in at least one hand- over-hand movement.
Pointing-for-self, index finger carefully extended to examine close
objects, also appeared in this period.  Still, however, no signs of
any interest whatsoever in imitation, old models or new, although she
would watch in fascination as I tried to elicit something.

 In this same time period, Julia's first "game" appeared: taking off
hats put on her head by an adult; this soon generalized to taking hats
off adult heads, and off the heads of various toy animals.  One of the
more interesting aspects of this game is that it had been "taught" to
her by our friend Barbara who babysat for us one evening.  I had no
idea that the game was now in Julia's repertoire, and yet I found
myself playing it with her the next day.  Somehow Julia had given me
signals indicating that this was a game that would now work; but I
have no idea what the signals were.  It SEEMED to be a passive game,
but obviously at some level Julia initiated it.  Julia's role in this
game became more and more active.  By Christmas she was attempting to
put hats on other people's heads herself, albeit unsuccessfully.  For
the last two weeks she has reliably put any piece of cloth at all on
and/or over her head, sometimes parading around the house with it.

There is a potential confusion, however, between "Hat" and peekaboo.
Julia had begun to enjoy peekaboo passively around 6 months
(coinciding with standing up in her crib, which inspired George to try
it out).  Her active placing of hats on heads coincides with actively
putting cloth over her own face or an adult face, so that it is often
difficult to figure out which game is which or whether they have
indeed blended together entirely.  Curtains reliably elicit a jerking
back-and-forth lateral movement, however, which is quite distinct from
the vertical placement movement associated with wearing hats.

Julia learned to take off her socks between 8 and 9 months, and treats
socks very much like a "transitional object": carrying them all over
the house (sometimes not letting go literally for hours!), shaking
them, and creating a new game of putting socks in the adult mouth (a
game that does not have the universal appeal of, say, pattycake....).
As of 1/20/84, there are tenuous examples of socks and shoes being
held in the direction of her foot.

She began "singing" in the backseat of the car some time in the period
between Italy and her 7th month birthday, not in obvious imitation but
certainly augmented if there was music and if I sang along.  She
sometimes appeared to beat time with her hands on the carseat.  At the
same time, however, she also seems to enjoy prolonged sound in the car
because of the vibration set up by the moving vehicle.

With her new, sharp little teeth Julia began the nasty habit of biting
during breastfeeding, somewhere around 5 - 6 months.  I cried out and
yelled "Don't bite!" as other mothers had suggested, and she did
indeed seem to learn to inhibit biting.  The phrase "Don't bite" in
particular seems to make her stop, but this is confounded with tone of
voice and with situational cues.  As of 1/20/84, biting seems to be a
much more controlled teasing game: Julia stood in my lap and tried to
"bite" my nose, putting her teeth around it and laughing but not
pressing down.  I then did the same to her, eliciting hysterical
laughter, and we went back and forth taking turns at "not biting" for
about 3 minutes.  (This game now seems well established, having been
initiated by Julia several times across the next few days.)

Consonants began to appear in her stream of babbling between 6-7
months, but very clear CV consonants did not occur until closer to her
8 month birthday, when she and I spent two weeks in Holland with the
Clarks (where Julia went to a Dutch babysitter every day).  The Dutch
babysitter, upon finding out that DADA is daddy in English, tried
training DADA constantly day after day.  I don't know if this
increased the output or not, but Julia did say DADADADADA about a
thousand times on the trip home--until precisely the moment of seeing
her daddy, whereupon she became entirely mute.

Julia's motor skills leapt forward on the Holland trip, with vast
amounts of floor freedom and a world of 4-year-old boy toys to
explore.  She pulled herself up to high shelves, stood on tiptoe, and
reached to pull things down.  Seeing her diving headlong off of
couches, Eve and Herb suggested I initiate and practice the command
"Feet first!"  while maneuvering Julia into the right position for
descent.  I began the practice then, but spontaneous backing down on
her part is only obvious now, at nine months of age.  The command
"feet first" seemed to make her hesitate (as did her name, or the word
"no") between 8 and 9 months, but I would not be entirely comfortable
calling this language comprehension.

Our sleeping-through-the-night experiment began in earnest upon the
return from my exhausting nights in Holland.  Two weeks later, after
some marginal success, we left for Florida and New York, a Christmas
voyage, with me (finally) in great anticipation of changes around the
nine-month boundary that I had studied for so many years.  Again the
trip brought intense stimulation, although it is not always clear how
much changes before my eyes and how much I see only because I am
around much more.  Florida brought another 4-year-old boy, Andrew,
whom Julia treated with the same fascination and adulation accorded to
Damon in Holland.  Andrew did not quite share Julia's enthusiasm (nor
had Damon).  In any case, whatever cognitive growth took place during
that period was evidenced more by watching than acting, as Julia's
followed her hero's every move.  Diane and Jerry's great dog Toad was
a particular favorite, and Julia followed him wherever she
could--including up and down stairs.  To my relief, she began to show
signs of mastering "feet first" in this her first serious encounter
with stairs.  There were still no signs of imitation or of language
comprehension during the visits, but changes began in earnest
immediately after our return.

During the trip home, I noticed two examples of increases in memory:
(1) She loved to play with an enamel bracelet that I had been wearing,
but did so much damage to it that George surreptitiously hid it at one
point.  A couple of hours later, Julia began searching up my sleeve
and turning my arm over, apparently in search of the bracelet; (2) On
the first of our two airplanes, she had flirted extensively with a
passenger in the seat behind; on the second flight, a few hours later,
she looked over and around the seat in apparent puzzlement, several
times, as though she expected her passenger friend to be there.  Two
other, perhaps more compelling instances of memory occurred the next
day: (1) Julia desperately wanted my glass of white wine, and in
contrast to the good old days when she could be distracted, persisted
in reaching and climbing toward it no matter where I put it.  I
finally concluded that she might be thirsty, whereupon George took her
to the kitchen and poured applejuice into a regular glass.  She
refused to take it--until he poured it into a wine glass and gave it
to her that way!  (2) Even though she might occasionally cry bitterly
for a few minutes when put down for a nap, she had never seemed to
"hold a grudge" upon awakening; that day, however, when George came in
to get her after a one hour nap (a nap that had been taken unwillingly
despite sleepy rubbing of eyes), she turned her back to him and faced
the wall while whimpering--angry and hurt, or at least so it seemed,
for several minutes until distracted by play.

Before Christmas, Julia began taking objects out of containers (with
regular practice at her grandparents' in emptying a basket of
christmas cards one at a time).  In particular, she stood at her white
plastic toyboxes and pulled things out, dragged clothing out of
suitcases, and pulled whatever she could out of open drawers.  I tried
to get her to build a two-block tower before Christmas, and she did
indeed try but failed.  She could take rings off a ringstack
relatively well at this point, but still needs help (although she
tries patiently) in putting them back on, several weeks later.  After
Christmas, she began clumsily putting objects back into containers.
This behavior became more and more skilled so that by 1/19/84 she was
delicately inserting the little FisherPrice man into a small nesting
cup.  This was sufficiently difficult, however, that she sought out
(seemingly quite purposefully) a larger container from among her toys
and repeated the drop- in/shake-out sequence with that.  I bought her
first shapebox immediately after Christmas, and she was quite
proficient at throwing blocks in when the top was off.  She also tried
with occasional success to insert blocks through the holes.

She has another shapebox with individual doors for removing individual
blocks--still a very difficult toy for her.  The box has a little head
in the middle, which cannot be removed but squeaks when pressed down.
One of Julia's first clearcut imitations of a novel model (at 9;2)
occurred with this toy: I batted the head down with a block several
times; she picked up a different block and batted it on top of the
head as well.

Cindy tells us that waving bye-bye was established already by our
first week back; we did not see it ourselves until a week or so later.
The eliciting stimulus did not appear to be linguistic, but rather,
the event of someone relevant getting up and going toward the door.
Now, two weeks later, waving by someone else can (finally) elicit
waving by Julia, albeit sporadically.  This morning (1/18/84) I could
have sworn that she said "hai" while waving to me as I went through
the bedroom door.  (Repeat observation of same 1/19/84).  On 1/20/84
there are several examples of waving while saying what seems to be a
blend of hi/bye, particularly when we get up to go out the door at the
babysitters.  This includes elicitation of waving with just the
sentence "We're going to go bye-bye now", before we actually got up to
go.

The much heralded events of showing, then reluctant giving, then more
spontaneous giving, have also occurred between Christmas and the
middle of January.  One might hallucinate that her "DADU" sounds
during object exchanges are an attempt at our own oft-repeated "Thank
you", but I wouldn't swear to it.  Still no signs of communicative
pointing as defined in our multitudinous papers on the topic.

The closest thing to ritualized requests are: arms extended to be
picked up, giving objects to be operated upon (in particular books to
be read), a few clear instances of going over to the highchair and
patting it while looking at me (around dinner time).  No particular
request gestures, although a repetitive sound of MAMAMAMAMA has, for a
few days now, occurred in laments--usually while crawling up on me, or
reaching toward me from the playpen, but George does get it too.
Whines have gotten quite insistent and irritating, with her eyes fixed
on us in undeniable expectation whatever the goal.  This behavior is
particularly noteworthy in the highchair when she is either bored with
the food currently on her tray or interested in the food that we have
instead.  In general, her babbling seems to have increased greatly in
complexity in the last week, with more and more "wordlike"
productions.  In particular, there are more complex vowels such as an
"oi" diphthong, and more variation in consonant-vowel combinations.


 Pattycake has also emerged at last.  Three weeks ago she received a
book of nursery rhymes with a pattycake page, and we modelled
pattycake at every reading.  She would not imitate, and resisted when
we tried to mold her hands while reciting the rhyme.  Last week,
however, we sneaked in to watch her chattering in her bed alone after
a nap-- and found her surreptitiously practicing at clapping her
hands!  Within a few hours, she clapped spontaneously on seeing the
pattycake page in the book, and has given us the book (rejecting other
books) several times while clapping and looking expectant.  The
clapping scheme is now generalizing, produced in a wide variety of
contexts, with or without initiation by an adult.

 Three days ago, while Julia was home with a bad cold, I pulled out
her toy telephone and (as I have many times in the past) pretended to
talk to someone, and then handed her the phone.  This time she put it
up in the general vicinity of her ear, and then handed it back to me.
This exchange went on for about five minutes, and George has elicited
it successfully several times since then.

1/18/84.  George took Julia to the kitchen, saying "You want some
applejuice?" while bringing out the bottle.  He swears that she
repeated, twice, "applejuice".  Our efforts to replicate the
experiment the next morning failed, however.

 1/20/84.  This morning, while I was changing her diaper, Julia picked
up a shoe and said to me something that sounded very much like "djoo".
I pointed to it and said "Yes, that's a SHOE", and she then said
"Shhoi".

1/22/84.  "shoe" is quite clearly established now, made upon seeing
and/or picking up any of several shoes.  The phonological form is
quite variable (shoi, djoo, ssshhh, sssss, soooo), but the context is
reliable.

This weekend her manipulation of objects climbed to new baroque
levels.  She has a set of 12 hexagonal, multicolored nesting cups,
which she played with for over 20 minutes on Friday.  Sometimes she
successfully inserted a small cup in a large one (carefully adjusting
the angle of the container cup to receive the insert); other times she
would set a larger one inside a smaller one by one corner, thereby
creating an ersatz container/tower.  With this apparently random
combination of nesting behaviors she actually managed to nest five
containers!  The nesting scheme is generalizing to other objects as
well.  For example, this morning she carefully inserted her shoe
inside of George's several times.


The original hat/peekaboo complex is now becoming a richer and more
varied dressing game.  She pulled out batches of dirty laundry this
morning, repeatedly pulling articles over her head or around her
shoulders (she can insert her head through the leghole in George's
underwear, a movement that she may connect with putting on her own
shirts when I dress her).  Both this game and nesting schemes are
sometimes demarcated by pattycake when finished--hence pattycake seems
to have blended with applause.  Yesterday morning we tried a different
dressing scheme, putting glasses on my nose, George's nose and her
nose.  When it was her turn she quite competently held her head back
to keep the enormous glasses balanced on her tiny face.  A little
later she tried several times to put her shoes on my face--so this is
either a total confusion of dressing, or a creative blend of schemes
(take your choice).

Julia is now on the tenth and final day of an antibiotic with a
particularly pleasant taste.  She at first resisted medication, as she
resists having anything forced at her.  However, George cleverly
decided to use the dropper from her vitamins (which she likes), so
that we began a routine of wrapping the green towel around her
barberchair fashion to prevent spills, and administering three
droppersfull of the pink medicine.  This morning she put her head back
and sat in position as soon as George brought out the towel, opened
her mouth expectantly, and punctuated the removal of the towel at the
end with clapping.  A lipsmacking and "yum" sound have occurred within
this same routine, and may be generalizing to other foods.


A couple of observations on comprehension: When we visited Cindy on
Friday (to see her new infant), she mentioned that she is sure Julia
has understood the word "bottle" for about two months.  The evidence
is meager: Julia looks up and gets excited or expectant when Cindy
says "Do you want your bottle?".  Yesterday at the hardware store, I
had been wheeling Julia around the aisles for some time when I said
"Where's Daddy?"  She turned around and searched quite systematically
until she finally saw him.

1/23/84.  Waving is now quite clearly elicited just by the word "bye",
e.g. this morning when I read the phrase "Good-bye sun" in one of her
books.  George has the "feeling" that a lot more comprehension is
underway, although it is hard to document.  For example, yesterday he
set up her wooden rocking horse (which she can actually ride!).  When
going for the thousandth time (at her insistence) through her "Animal
sounds" book, he pointed out the relationship between "horsie" in the
book and the rocking horse.  Since then, when looking at the horsey
page (which she now seems to seek out), she looks carefully back and
forth as though comparing the two horses feature for feature.  She
also seems to recognize favorite foods when they are pulled out of the
cupboard (e.g. the raisin box).  Her requests are getting more and
more deliberate, systematic and insistent (one might also say
annoying....), in sound and in gesture.  This includes an "AH!" angry
request sound that sounds just like the one that I have parodied in my
talks on this topic for years.

It was quite clear yesterday after I took off her sock and shoe, that
she was trying to put each of them back on against her foot.  With her
shirt, this morning, she pulled away from me and tried to put it over
her own head, protesting when I tried to put it on her myself.
Cup-nesting and stacking proceeds apace, although she hasn't quite
matched her virtuoso five-cup nest from last Friday.  George thinks
she says "sock" as well as "shoe", but as always I remain skeptical.
Finally, the babysitter told us that Julia quite clearly imitated "bye
Jayna!"  last Friday (but would not repeat the performance when
asked).


1/24/84.  There are some reliable changes in the use of pointing in
the last few days, a shift from a "point-for-self" in up-close
observation, to pointing at interesting people, objects or events at a
distance.  This includes pointing at me and smiling.  However, I have
not yet observed her turning to look at me while pointing at some
third party, i.e. the quintessential evidence for communicative
pointing.  Giving is now so well established that she will cross the
room to give me something, especially a book that she wants me to
read.

 2/1/84.  There have not been many changes since the last entry, but
some interesting problems have been posed.  Requests are ever more
varied; if we do anything interesting involving an object (book,
mechanical toy, handpuppet) she will hand the object back to us, wait
expectantly, and protest emphatically if we do not obey.  The bye-bye
scheme is quite well-practiced now; it seems to have been followed,
however, by a new phenomenon of crying and upset when we get up to
leave her at the babysitter's.  Departures are apparently much better
understood.  Jaylene tells us (as did Cindy 3 weeks ago, but we didn't
believe it) that Julia knows when it is 4 - 5 o'clock and we are due
to arrive soon.  She watches the door, fusses, jumps at sudden sounds.
She has not been 100% well the last few weeks: she is on her second
antibiotic, with ear involvement and an endless runny nose, taking
3-hour naps some days.  I would not be surprised if this has slowed
things down, though she is certainly never listless.  In any case, I
would not want to claim any advances in language comprehension or
production over the last entry.  There are some changes in gestural
schemes, but these present a very interesting problem of
interpretation.  Specifically, the same hand motion seems to be
applied with variation to a number of distinct contexts, leading to
the question "Is this one scheme or six?": (1) bye-bye (as described
above, up and down hand motion); (2) hairbrushing (back and forth
movement in the general direction of the head, with the hairbrush,
applied to her own head or ours-- but only with heavy contextual
support, both gestural and verbal); (3) pattycake (back and forth hand
motion of two hands, one againsst the other, as described above); (4)
wiping-the- floor, elicited this morning for the first time: Julia
watched me wiping up the floor around her highchair with a papertowel,
and then, with a babywipe already in hand, wiped back and forth on the
floor with a lateral motion); (5) first in imitation, then
spontaneously, she moves her Fisher Price bus back and forth on the
floor (so far no other vehicles have been honored with this scheme);
(6) pat-the-horsie, on or by her rocking horse, following an analogous
gesture by us and/or (maybe) the phrase "Nice horsie, nice, nice...."
(she has similarly stroked and patted several other toys on request,
and will pat George or me in response to "Nice mommy/daddy").  What
are the bondaries of this gestural event? Is it one multipurpose
scheme acted out in several planes, or does she believe the actions
are separate?  This is similar to the meld of dressing/peekaboo/hat
described above.  Only the telephone scheme currently stands alone,
unconfounded in form or context.  The problem seems very analogous to
the issue of homophony is language, discussed widely in the
literature.

There are a couple of weak changes in language: in contrast with the
sound MAMAMA in request/laments, DA seems to function more and more
like a declarative or attention-directing and orienting sound,
particularly while pointing; and yet I could not clearly say that she
points communicatively, expecting a response from us equivalent to the
clear expectations in giving and showing.  When George arrived to pick
her up today, however, she said DADA quite distinctly when he came in.
Speaking of homophony.....  Yesterday at Jaylene's she was holding
part of a cookie firmly in hand when I came in the door and picked her
up; she said "ca" (a sound rarely made in random babblings) while
looking down at her clenched fist.  Shoe-like sounds still occur, in
the right contexts; today, I asked her to give me the shoe and she did
so (but, quite honestly, shoes were also the most salient choice in
that context).

I have tried further object permanence testing.  Although confusions
and distractions are rampant, persistent searches of several screens
are not uncommon.  On a couple of occasions (e.g. hiding the Fisher
Price man in my hand and dumping it under my blouse or skirt) she
seemed to infer one invisible displacement; on other invisible
displacements, she acted utterly mystified.  I can conclude little.
Her interest in nesting cups and the other virtuoso manipulative games
has waned; yet, when she wants to, she seems to get better and better
at fine motor activity (e. placing the man-in-the-turtle tub toy
carefully into its appropriate hole, several times in succession,
while the container bobbed up and down in her bath and hence presented
great difficulties as a target).  Similarly, her rapt interest in each
and every page of a book has given way to quick boredom by Page 2;
instead, she seems to delight in handing us books one after another.
Of course, I went through periods in which I felt that way about cheap
novels.....

2/5/84.  Today on two occasions she seemed to say "book" while picking
up or looking at a book.  However, as with all her word-like sounds so
far, the sound could at best be described as a vague aim at an
articulatory target.  It is still quite ambiguous.  If I give her all
possible benefits of the doubt, her productive vocabulary would
currently consist of the following: Hi/bye (a related sound is now
made in playing telephone, with receiver to ear); shoe; da or dada (as
an indicative/declarative sound in excited observation of objects;
maybe also as a name for daddy); mamamamama (as a general request);
cookie/cracker ("ca"); book (sounding more like the German "buch");
mmm or yum as a comment on preferred foods.  Her gestural repertoire
would include the following: waving, pattycake, telephoning, brushing,
wiping, patting or caressing, over-the-head dressing, shoe/sock to
foot, pushing the car.  I've excluded the giving/showing/pointing
complex from this cadre of proto-symbolic conventions.  Another, still
more ambiguous case occurred yesterday: seeing her carseat on the
floor at the babysitter's (where she had never seen it before--indeed
never outside of a car at all) she climbed up in the seat and sat
down.  Is this "sitting itself", or a recognitory scheme of the "I
know what this is for..."  type?  Drinking from bottles or cups still
seems to be "the thing itself" rather than a recognitory scheme.  The
same can be said of opening books and turning the pages.  But more
than ever before, I am aware of how ambiguous the passage from action
to symbol really is.

Jaylene reported Julia's "first step" Thursday, and claimed that it
happened again Friday.  We still haven't seen it, but she is standing
alone without support more and more often, and for longer periods of
time.  Walking may well be about to happen.

Being around Jayna, who is now eight months old, seems to have had two
effects on Julia.  First, she has gone back to her "ciuccio" or
pacifier with a vengeance (coupled by a new and perhaps final lack of
interest in the breast).  Second, she has taken to a kind of silly
excited laugh that she never produced before, but which bears an
uncanny resemblance to happy little Jayna's typical demeanor.

2/20/84.  There have been few entries recently, largely because little
has changed, at least overtly.  Indeed, some of the schema that were
active a couple of weeks ago have virtually disappeared--except for a
wide proliferation of petting/caressing, due perhaps to recent
exciting encounters with dogs and cats.  This includes petting the
appropriate animals (dogs, horses, cats) in books.  I had not seen
pattycake for a long time, but elicited it with no trouble on showing
Julia the pattycake page from her nursery rhyme book (which had
disappeared from view for a couple of weeks).  So I suspect all those
schemes are still "in there", but she seems to have lost interest
after mastery as rapidly as she did in her very early accomplishments
like handwatching and vocal imitation at 3 months.  I wonder whether
this will be a stable aspect of her temperament.  Julia still isn't
walking, though one step progressed as far as four a couple of weeks
ago.  She also stands up without support, and can even lean over and
pick up grass and flowers from a standing position.  However, she
seems to have adopted a spraddle-legged stance that is indeed quite
good for standing but not a convenient position from which to begin a
walk.  Communicative pointing, looking back and forth from referent to
addressee, clearly occurs now--but this has not been accompanied by
any decrease in pointing entirely for herself.  Her manipulative play
seems, if anything, to have taken a step backwards.  For several weeks
now she seems much less interested in nesting cups, blocks, etc.
However, she has been newly introduced to jigsaw puzzles and spends
considerable time trying to fit pieces into the appropriate or
inappropriate holes.

 Breastfeeding is finally over; perhaps as a result, she is more
interested now in cuddling for its own sake.  I have been trying to
teach her to hug toy animals and other soft things, but I don't think
she has quite caught on.  However, if told "Don't pull" when she is
frantically petting a visiting dog or pulling parental hair, she
bursts into furious tears.  We are trying to be consistent in our
"discipline"; it certainly isn't easy!

 Julia was a "demonstration baby" in a course on infant development
last week.  She made a hit in her new sunglasses (which she will
proudly wear for long periods of time).  The testing was standard
Piagetian object permanence: Julia performed solidly at high Stage 5,
able to follow two visible displacements with no confusion at all, but
balking at three.  She gave some ambiguous evidence on a single
invisible displacement (as she has for me), so it is hard to tell if
she can make the inference that an object must be in the place where
it last disappeared even if you did not witness the hiding beneath the
screen.

3/3/84.  I have made no entries for some time, largely because of my
own schedule, but also because the changes in Julia are still so
gradual and difficult to specify.  I continue to be surprised by the
"now you see it, now you don't" nature of Julia's accomplishments,
since the beginning.  The accumulative view of vocabulary/gesture
development that we have maintained in our studies seems more
questionable.  Are all those protowords and gestural schemes still "in
there", underground, when they disappear for weeks on end?  Or have
they genuinely decayed in some way?  I certainly hope Julia won't have
the same attitude toward college....


 She seems to be sneaking up on walking at a very cautious pace.
Weeks after she took four steps, and we thought the moment was nigh,
she is still at approximately the same level.  She adores walking
about the house with support, and actually seems to prefer bipedal
approaches to goals via furniture to her more efficient crawling.  But
her record number of unsupported steps now stands at seven.

Symbolic development proceeds at the same gradual pace.  If anything,
I see even less evidence than I did a month ago.  And yet we have
sudden virtuoso moments that make me believe that a great deal is
going on underground.  Two weeks ago we had a language comprehension
orgy in the evening before bed.  We were in the large bedroom outside
hers, with a variety of toys and familiar objects around.  On command,
she pointed to (1) the horsie, (2) a shoe, (3) a hat, (4) glasses, (5)
a toy lion, (6) a sock.  She also attempted to put the hat on the
horsie when asked to do so, and similarly tried to put the sock on the
lion on request.  There was of course considerable contextual support
for the multiword commands, but I was impressed nonetheless.  In the
next few days I obtained some similar evidence for comprehension of
book, doggie, ciuccio, and bottle.  In addition, when asked "Where's
the horsie?" while in the living room, she turned and pointed in the
direction of the large bedroom where the horse is kept.  Other times,
however, I set the items up in a circle, begin going through the
roster of supposedly known objects, and evoke thoroughly random
behavior.  Is it "there", or not?  I asked her to alternately feed me
raisins and cheerios from her tray last week, and performance did seem
above chance.  Comprehension of the new word "flower", together with a
sniffing gesture, seems to work with a variety of real and depicted
flowers-- but again, the evidence is stochastic at best.  It really is
difficult to know how much of the unreliability in eliciting Julia's
language and gestural schemes is due to the precarious nature of the
schemes themselves, or to Julia's own capricious temperament.

Julia has become so much more affectionate in this month since the end
of breastfeeding, cuddling into our chests, hugging (humans and toy
animals), patting.  However, her affection is not restricted to us.
She seems quite attached to her babysitters (first the substitute
Jaylene, now Cindy once again), and also quite willing to climb into
the arms of family friends and visitors who are her merest
acquaintances.  Of course, given the nature of her daily life, this is
the healthiest possible solution.  I do regret it from time to time,
selfishly wishing that she had eyes only for me, and perhaps, for
George.  However, given a weekend day together at last, Julia does
still seem (oh wonder!) to hold me dearest of all.  I had feared that
she would have a Cinderella reaction to Cindy's new baby, particularly
now that the process of breastfeeding is a spectator sport.  However,
Cindy reports no problems, just an avid visual interest from time to
time.  Julia still seeks my breasts out sometimes in the early
morning, playing in bed with us, but after a quick test she obviously
concludes that the damned things don't work anymore.  I don't detect
any resentment, nor any really serious disappointment.  The bottle is
still a happy companion, and her renewed affair with the pacifier
seems to be substitute enough for the rest.  Although Julia can be
very fussy when overly tired or marginally ill (which happens all too
often), she now seems to have a happy, even disposition most of the
time.  She goes to bed regularly, without problems; in fact, if we are
still out playing in the living room at 7:30, she will often throw her
little head down on the floor and sigh until we carry her into bed.
We could never have predicted this in those difficult early months.
She has picked up a couple of proto-tantrum schemes: arching her back
sharply when pulled away from some forbidden goal, screaming when told
"don't pull".  But we have worked hard at being firm, comforting her
and/or trying to distract her as soon as possible, but not giving in.
Last week she moved toward the back of the television table, in the
direction of forbidden wires and a lamp, and turned to look at me with
a wicked grin.  She also shook her head several times, in a
sensorimotor display of conscience.  I came over to pull her away, and
I think she was almost grateful.  Let's hope that the pattern repeats
itself in adolescence...


 3/20/84.  We are almost up to Julia's one year birthday.  I have made
no entries for a couple of weeks (more because of my own schedule than
Julia's), and it may be hard to keep track of all that has happened.
First of all, she is now most definitively a walker, although the
transition was so gradual that it reminded me of my own, shall we say,
overly gradual passage into womanhood.  Seven steps became ten, then
crossing half a room, then a whole room, and now long journeys are
occasionally executed on foot through the entire house.  She will try
to walk carrying enormous burdens, and extricates her foot from
obstacles without looking.  Perhaps all that caution has paid off.
This "walk don't run" approach is so similar to her approach to
language that I am tempted to infer a common cause.


Julia's language comprehension continually comes out like the
sunshine, and then goes back behind the clouds.  A rough tally, giving
all benefit of the doubt, would suggest that the following items are
now understood: bottle, keys, doggie, lion, daddy, ciuccio, book
(including a differentiation between other books and "Mister Brown" by
Dr. Seuss, which she can distinguish from the others; the pattycake
book may have a similar status), flower, tree, car, chair, diaper,
shoe, sock, glasses, raisin, cheerio, nose, Cindy, baby, horsie,
applejuice, plus perhaps the phrases Don't bite, Don't pull, no, feet
first.  At the birthday point, I intend to do a more systematic test
of all of these plus a few more, since I think this may well now be an
underestimate.


Her language production, again requiring benefit of the doubt, is
harder to characterize.  Hi/bye seems to have disappeared for the
moment, nor have I heard shoe in a while.  A wordlike sound dis is
constantly used now while manipulating or pointing to things of
interest.  I and/or others have heard her make appropriate and fairly
general use of tree, horsie, and something rather like doggie.  While
at the park with Barbara this past weekend, Julia pointed to a car and
said something very like car.  I took her to the zoo 10 days ago, and
after I had pointed out and named the monkeys many times she began to
repeat something like Mong...  However, after she had done this a few
times she pointed straight at the monkey cage and twice said buh.  I
corrected her a couple of times until I noticed that she had her
finger extended pointing to a small bird sitting on the railing
outside the monkey's cage!!  This is why the Language Acquisition
Device has to be impervious to a little bad data!!  Her aim at
linguistic targets is always imprecise, and monosyllabic, which makes
it harder to assess what target she might have in mind.  Clearly,
however, she aims more often at nominals.  Furthermore, I see little
evidence of words restricted to a single referent and/or context;
rather, once something appears, it seems to be applied to several
perceptual variants of the target class (dogs, birds, monkeys, shoes,
etc.)

 I still see relatively little in the way of recognitory gestures
and/or immediate and deferred gestural imitations.  There are a few
nice examples, however, of range of extension.  For example, she now
tries to feed her food or ciuccio regularly to adults, other children
(including Cindy's infant), and toy animals including her big wooden
horsie.  Two days ago she picked up her big plastic cylindrical
shapebox and briefly "drank" out of it.  Various telephones (which do
indeed vary these days) receive the requisite gesture of placement at
the ear.  She will pick up tissues and "wipe" her own nose, and try to
wipe other people's noses as well.  Brushing is enthusiastically (and
sometimes painfully) carried out on her head, other human heads, and
the horsie's mane.  Patting/stroking is extended to a wide variety of
animate recipients or toy animals, as is hugging.  For example, she
can now frequently be found hugging her baby lion or some other
stuffed animal in bed at night.  Today at Cindy's, she curled up on
the couch next to the infant Ben, hugged him, placed her head against
his, and sighed.  She seems to take Ben's welfare seriously, pressing
toys and clothes against his body including (and particularly)
diapers.  Furthermore, even brand new gestures are immediately
extended to more than one recipient, such as a nonsense gesture of
clapping a bowl-like plastic toy against the nose which Barbara
modelled last weekend.  Barbara also showed her how to stuff things in
her pocket, which she spent the rest of the afternoon doing.  The next
day, dressed in another pair of overalls with no front pocket, she
kept looking down and patting the front of her overalls in frustration
and puzzlement.

Evidence both for language comprehension and (perhaps) representation
was offered this weekend, when Julia had spent much of the morning
playing with my keys, finally dumping them on a ledge behind the
couch.  That evening, George asked her "Where are the keys?"  She
began by looking all over the floor, but then finally (and with some
suddeness, as if it had just come to her) climbed up to the couch and
reached behind to retrieve the keys from the ledge. Similarly, asked
"Where's the horsie", she will go off to find her horsie in the back
room from a variety of locations in the house--but of course this has
a firmer long-term memory basis than the instance with the keys behind
the couch.

I showed her a photograph album last week, and she pointed to herself
and to George and me with considerable excitement, as though she
definitely saw some connection (although I suspect that the early baby
pictures of herself were confused with her companion Baby Ben, who is
now at an equivalent age).  That prompted us to the decision to make
her a big photograph book of best known objects and people, as an
upcoming birthday present.  That should give us some interesting
insights very shortly.

 I had to leave Julia for four whole days this last weekend, the first
time we have ever been apart overnight.  In fact, George spent such
high density time with her that I suspect it did her more good than
harm.  In any case, I returned Sunday night too late to wake her up,
and she saw me for the first time in 96 hours when I came in to get
her Monday morning.  I was prepared for some anger and resentment, but
it was milder than that.  She stood at the bottom of her crib nearest
the door, and when she saw me come in, looked quite surprised, almost
embarrassed, and glanced down quickly biting onto the edge of the
crib.  I picked her up, and she strained away, but as if to cover the
apparent rudeness she began pointing to an embroidered bear on her
wall quite nearby ("I'm not really avoiding you, I just think that we
ought to discuss this bear....").  I got her bottle, brought her into
bed with us, and she lay there sucking on the bottle and not looking
at me despite my efforts for a while.  Within five minutes, however,
still not looking, she reached out with her hand and began patting and
exploring my face.  The rest of the morning was all warmth and smiles
and hugs.  She forgives quickly.



                          JULIANOTES 2




3/21/84.  Of course, immediately after I printed out and copied this
diary up through the last entry, a pile of new instances occurred.
First, I picked Julia up at Cindy's, and on the way to the car she
pointed at our Honda and said "cah".  The same word was uttered today
in the school parking lot, as well as from my office window up five
stories high overlooking the parking lot.  She said "tree" (which
sounds more like "teh") on seeing our coral tree going into the house
last night, and on seeing an entirely different couple of trees on
campus today.  I held her up to the mirror last night at home, and she
said something very much like "baby" (which, according to Cindy, she
refuses to say despite much prompting to baby Ben).  Standing at the
edge of the tub last night, she pointed to the water running from the
tap and said something halfway between "ba" and "pa"-- which might be
related either to "bath" or "splash-splash" or both.  I have also
noted an array of other monosyllables that seem quite deliberate, made
while pointing and looking at me for acknowledgment, but alas remain
uninterpretable for the moment.


We had some interesting comprehension examples last night as well.
With very careful and deliberate searching she managed to retrieve
from a crowded toybox the following requested items: shoe, glasses,
telephone (which she immediately put to her ear).  I asked for the
car, indicating a rather schematic wooden toy car on the floor.  She
looked quite puzzled, and then reached around and pointed out the
front door.  I tried my command again, and she again insisted on the
front door (i.e. toward the street where our car is parked).  So "car"
clearly refers only to large vehicles.  She did, however, demonstrate
her rolling- back-and- forth gesture with her toy bus.  I doubt very
much that gestures with toy cars and names for real cars are mapped
onto each other in any way at this point.

The only body part name that I can elicit reliably, on various human
and animal faces, is "nose".  However, Cindy believes that Julia knows
other body parts as well, in particular "mouth" in the context of
feeding.  I gave Cindy a copy of the notes up to today, and should
thus be able to get some more updated observations from her shortly.


3/22/84.  A couple of new things, including further evidence for the
range of extension of "car" in production (e.g.  pointing out the
window at Piret's at the traffic outside).  At dinner last night she
asked for "juice" repeatedly by name, and said "dah" over and over
when a dog barked outside (this varies between "dah" and "dah/ee" as
though "doggie" is her vague target).  Although I haven't kept good
track of word/pointing combinations so far, I did note that the
dog-outside was named while she pointed at the back door.  She also
said "nice" a couple of times while petting animals and people.  I
think she has made a stab at "lion" more than once in an appropriate
context, but this word is particularly unclear phonologically.  It
seems as though she is suddenly trying to say so many things, with
clear communicative intent, but her phonology really is so difficult
to decode that I am hesitant to read too much in.  I do have the clear
impression, however, that very little of this is imitative.
Furthermore, terms seem to "come out" only after they have gone
through considerable decontextualization entirely underground; hence
first uses are typically correct, ranging across several different
exemplars of a set.  But then again, perhaps those are the only ones
that I can really decode.  One thing is certain: her "aims" at a
target are more often spontaneous than imitative, as if she has been
giving it some prior thought.

 3/26/84.  The birthday weekend has come and gone.  We gave Julia a
FisherPrice farm (with associated animals) and a FisherPrice nursery
set (with tiny playpen, changing table, cradle, stroller, highchair
and rocking horse, plus a baby and several people).  She has played
with these fairly intensely since then, although it would be difficult
to claim that her play is representational.  With the play pen, she
did try very hard to put her own foot inside (pushing it down with her
hand).  This playpen is so unlike a shoe, that I think she was
genuinely trying to climb inside the three inch square space!  She
places the various people into appropriate holes, but that is fairly
ambiguous in and of itself.  I've modelled a number of things for her,
however, which seem to fascinate her: sundry caretaking behaviors with
the "baby", especially putting it in the highchair and feeding it real
or imaginary raisins.  Still no imitation of these.  However, she also
received a teaset for her birthday, and drank immediately from the
small cups.  I modelled stirring in a cup with a spoon and feeding
various animals; she reproduced the stirring part quite nicely, but
the feeding/eating was less clear.  Another of her presents was a set
of "bristleblocks", square and rectangular colored plastic shapes with
very short thick bristles that permit the blocks to stick together
easily.  To my surprise, Julia picked up one and brushed her hair with
it, the most abstract object recognition scheme I've seen to date.

The back-and-forth headshake gesture is still an interesting one,
appearing when someone says "no" or when she is about to do something
that she apparently knows to be forbidden.  This new "concept" of
wickedness seems to go hand- in-hand with an increasingly wicked gleam
in her own eye when she contemplates forbidden activities, accompanied
by coy facial expressions and a "scrunching" of the shoulders.  The
coyness is also rampant in the context of approaching new people:
walking toward them, then turning tail and clinging to or hiding
behind a parental leg, rubbing the eyes while looking downward with a
big grin.  Watching displays like this a couple of weeks ago, a
graduate student of mine said "She really is beautiful, but there is
too much devil in her eyes to make me wish that she were mine."

4/12/84.  Another long hiatus in writing, once again my fault more
than Julia's.  We have been on two trips as a family: Stanford/San
Francisco for the Child Language Forum, and New York City for the
infancy conference.  Alas, my memory for various incidents is fading,
but I will do my best.

 The first thing to point out is that the increase in vocabulary noted
above has eased off; in fact, some of her fledgling words seem to have
disappeared.  A few others have consolidated.  In particular the words
BIRD, CAR, TREE, DOG, and SHOE are especially recognizable and have a
great contextual range.  There are many monosyllabic stabs at words,
with pointing and eye contact and every other sign of communicative
intent, but either this is a case of rampant homophony (e.g.  the
single sound "BUH" means twenty different things) or Julia is faking.
Her father tried teaching her several food words one morning, and got
relatively clear repetitions (many trials into the game) of CHEESE,
GRAPES, CHEERIOS.  CHEESE appeared later spontaneously (i.e. "CHEH")
in a very different context (and with very different cheese).  GRAPES
(or rather, "Geh") was repeated with alacrity upon exposure to plastic
grapes two weeks later, after I mentioned them only once.  However,
our newly arrived friend Virginia, staying about the house and
listening for examples, concludes that Julia can only say SHOE.  So
there is very little in the way of productive language on display
these days.

Nevertheless, there is much more evidence for language comprehension.
First of all, if I ask her "Where is X?", "Get the X" or any other
such question containing a likely target word, she becomes very intent
on looking around the room as if she were trying very hard to solve a
problem.  For a few words (HORSIE, CAR, DADDY) she reliably looks in
the right place immediately even if the target is not in view.  For
others, she seems to initiate a generic search until the target is
reached or forgotten.  For still others, I must admit, the search is
terminated by handing me an irrelevant substitute item.  The important
point is that the "game" of matching linguistic input to environmental
targets is very well established.

Perhaps more interesting is the new evidence for comprehension of word
combinations, albeit with great familiarity and contextual support.
For example, yesterday she had just put a little Fisher Price person
into the play barn, and closed the door.  The toy playpen sat right
next to the barn.  I asked her to "Put the little man in the playpen".
She opened the door, took out the little man, and put it directly in
the playpen without hesitation.  Next I asked her to "Put the little
man in the shoe", intending her to put it in a loose tennis shoe
sitting nearby.  She first looked at her foot in puzzlement and
grabbed her own shoe (how indeed could two objects occupy the same
space?).  I repeated my request a few times, she looked around and
finally hit upon the loose and unoccupied shoe, and placed the little
man inside.  Tonight I tried to repeat the incident with still less
contextual support, handing her the tiny wooden FP baby across the
room from the mess of toys where the playpen was located, saying "Put
the baby in the playpen".  She turned with the baby in hand and headed
for the toys, but stopped in confusion.  Later, with fewer distracting
options in the way, I repeated the first success by asking her "Get
the doggie" (which she did, retrieving the FP dog after a careful
search) and then saying "Put the doggie in the playpen."  So this new
ability is still a bit resource limited, but it generalizes
nonetheless.


PUT is not the only verb that elicits these combinatorial instances.
Julia has also responded to FEED THE (X) to (MOMMY, DADDY, VIRGINIA,
DOGGIE, HORSIE) by putting the pacifier, bottle or foodstuff in hand
up to the requested mouth.  And she will also respond to GIVE THE (X)
TO (etc.)  by pressing the target object against some/any part of the
recipient animal or person.  I've had more limited success with body
parts.  She has reliably switched nose owners when asked "WHERE'S
(DADDY's, MOMMY's, GRANDMA's, LION's, DOGGIE's, HORSIE's) NOSE, but
this ability seems restricted to noses.  On other body parts (ear,
hair, mouth, eye) we're lucky to get appropriate pointing on a single
owner.  This is, then, only the most tender beginnings of
combinatorial comprehension.

Her symbolic play/gesture is showing a pattern quite similar to the
pattern for words: few imitations, little spontaneous application, but
very general and "decontextualized" application of those schemes that
are available.  She has "brushed" with the most minimal of brushes,
without modelling, including Virginia's small purple barrett (with a
few schematic teeth) and a paintbrush-shaped brush for applying
powdered rouge.  In both cases, the would-be brush was applied without
prejudice to herself, daddy, mommy and Virginia; furthermore, with a
little verbal/gestural prompting (i.e.  holding the object up), she
also "brushed" the hairless FP animals.  Similarly, she dragged out a
babywipe and began to "blow/wipe" her own nose.  I briefly modelled
wiping the nose of the FP person, which she repeated and then extended
to a couple of other doll figures.  She will also "wipe" real or
imaginary substances off the floor with napkins and cloths.  The
gesture of running a car back and forth is now freely applied to the
FP tractor, stroller and anything else with wheels.  Furthermore,
tonight she put two FP persons inside the plain white rectangular FP
trough (for feeding animals in the farm set) and ran it back and forth
on the floor in the same way.  Finally, virtually anything resembling
a telephone, from one hotel room and house to another in the last two
trips, receives the requisite receive- to-ear gesture.

 This morning I dragged out her plastic tea set, which she hadn't seen
in about 10 days.  She stirred with the spoon in the cup, "ate" from
the tiny spoon, without modelling.  George modelled pouring from the
pitcher, and wiping the mouth with a napkin, and she reproduced both
across the next five minutes. In addition, she tried removing the lid
from the coffeepot and setting it carefully on top of a cup.  The
whole activity soon broke into manipulation of the parts: putting
different things in the cups, stirring across vessels, nesting.  I'm
curious to see how much and how long the TEA SCENE goes on in
subsequent encounters with the same toys, without modelling.
(However, George may have just destroyed the symbolic nature of the
whole process by bringing her teaset to the highchair, putting real
juice in the cups and real food on the plates!)


 I have long maintained that American children rarely use referential
gestures in communication, a point which Virginia disputes.  Not
surprisingly, given this amicable disagreement, Virginia noted a
phenomenon that I had missed entirely: when she recognizes a
"drinkable" (bottle, cup, glass) and/or when she wants something to
drink, even if it is not in sight, Julia emits a kind of
sucking/sipping sound with pursed lips.

Pattycake appears only sporadically.  However, for several days there
seemed to be an odd shift in the pattycake gesture, a vertical
movement of brushing the hands against each other which looks like the
adult "I'm through with this" gesture.  This may come from Julia's
mysterious social life during the day at Cindy's, about which we know
so little.

During the New York trip, Julia spent two nights with her grandparents
while George and I were in the city at the conference.  This was,
then, the first time she was separated from both of us at once
overnight, and in a relatively unfamiliar house.  We called every few
hours, worrying that Julia would be massively depressed.  Her
grandparents indicated, instead, that she was gleefully playing and
ordering her three slaves (George's brother Jim included) about the
house, giving/bringing them every loose object light enough to carry,
eating well and sleeping well and generally feeling fine.  The only
sign of concern was that Julia became increasingly unwilling to let
Grandma out of her sight, so that by Sunday afternoon (after her
father had left on Friday morning) no one but Grandma was allowed to
pick her up.  This suggests, of course, that she was starting to
worry... We came in the door Sunday evening and she looked at us from
Grandma's arms with what can only be described as an expression of
shock.  Across the next five minutes, she leapt from my arms to
George's with every increasing agitation, noise, excitement, until she
was finally literally running from one to the other crying "DAAA!
DAAAA!"  to both of us.  (In fact, both comprehension and production
examples across the next two days suggested that DAAA now means
"parent", both mother and father, although her father is still the
prototypic member of the DAAA category.)  The frenzied joy was
repeated when we arrived Monday afternoon at home.  She was clearly
excited to see her house when we pulled up, and when we got in she
again cried out in joy and trundled from room to room pointing and
greeting familiar objects with laughter and shouts.


 All of this sounds likely nothing but happy reunion behavior at every
step.  But this is not entirely correct.  There are several signs that
Julia was a bit upset by the separation.  For example, after the first
hour of joy on our Sunday night return, she became
uncharacteristically badtempered, throwing dramatic tantrums at the
least provocation (although they lasted no more than 60 seconds
despite their apparent desperation). This included a series in which
she pulled George's hair, was told to stop, cried, quite deliberately
ran over and pulled Grandma's hair, was told to stop, cried, then
reached up in frustration to pull her own hair and then REALLY cried!
The next day the tantrums had ceased, but any sudden or unexpected
change (e.g.  getting out of the car at the airport, Virginia getting
up and leaving in the airplane) triggered crying and the need for
comfort.  Although she is always affectionate, she seemed to want much
more cuddling than usual, and today (Thursday) is the first day that
she has played as independently as usual among her toys as we move
about the house.  Given all that we put her through in this series of
trips, she can hardly be blamed for worrying.


4/16/84.  For the last several days, we have had a series of meetings
on language and gesture, with Virginia Volterra and with Elissa
Newport and Ted Supalla.  This has, then, made me more sensitive to
issues of gesture and word/gesture combination in Julia's behavior.
In particular, Elissa and Ted are visiting with their 13-month-old
daughter Susanna, which has led to some interesting comparisons of the
language/gesture relationship in Susanna versus Julia.  In this
regard, a couple of anecdotes across the weekend are particularly
interesting.

First, I had tried explicitly about a month ago to teach Julia the
sniffing gesture for flowers.  She responded somewhat sporadically
across the next few days, and then seemed to drop the gesture
entirely.  Over the weekend the flower-sniffing gesture suddenly
reappeared and generalized to virtually everything in the garden that
Julia could pick up and hold to her nose.  Also, I had modelled
sniffing pictures of flowers in books a few times, a behavior which
Julia has now begun to produce spontaneously with one particular book
(i.e. she will go across the room, pick the book up, turn to the
flower page and sniff).  Finally, she emitted the sniffing
sound/gesture spontaneously from a distance today, while we passed a
flowering bush on the way to the babysitter's.  The use of the sniff
gesture to flower pictures does at least have a basis in my own
modelling.  However, this morning I was lying next to her in bed
(paying relatively little attention) when I heard her sniff to the
open flower page in the usual book.  I opened my eyes to watch, and
caught her moving on in the book to a picture of a telephone,
whereupon she immediately placed her closed fist up against her ear in
an empty-handed telephoning gesture.  I repeated the behavior myself a
couple of times, and she responded in kind again at least twice.
(This recognitory phone gesture was repeated in the next few days to
the same phone picture, and again on 4/26 to a different picture, in a
different book, of a teddybear making a telephone call.)

We also obtained some new observations on comprehension of
combinations last night.  She had come in from her bath clutching her
hairbrush, "riding" (with daddy's help) a large toy lion.  Upon
request, she brushed her own hair, Daddy's hair, Virginia's hair.
Later she responded to "Brush the lion's hair" by picking the brush up
again and brushing the top of the lion's head.  I then asked her to
"brush the lion's nose"; she responded by stroking the brush against
the lion's nose (albeit with some imprecision).  Virginia then picked
up her own sweater and asked Julia to "Dress the lion".  I paraphrased
the request with "Put the sweater on the lion".  Julia first held the
sweater up against the lion's head, and then placed it clumsily on top
of the lion's head--perhaps responding to both commands?  Or to common
sense, i.e.  known combinations between animate beings and sweaters?
I've tried with words and with modelling to get her to put diapers on
various animals, but so far this scheme doesn't seem to interest her
very much.  I also asked her yesterday, as she came into the room
carrying a spoon (and putting it to my face) to "Feed the horsie with
the spoon".  She did precisely that.

 We went to the zoo yesterday, and noted a great many examples of
attempted naming (particularly birds).  It seems fair to conclude at
this point that the sound complex "bah/beh/buh" is issued fairly
unsystematically (i.e. I can't find a principle determining which form
is used when), to refer to the following objects: bird, ball, balloon,
baby, bottle, bear.  The sound "Dah" is used with dogs (but was not
offered to describe any of the dog or catlike animals at the zoo).  In
addition, "dah" definitely refers to her father, and is also used
occasionally while approaching or pointing to me, or when protesting
my departure.  "Meh/mee" seems to be a complaint/request noise, as it
has for some time, although it does seem to occur with slightly
greater frequency when approaching me.  So who am I to Julia?  I'm not
sure yet.


"Teh" is still reliably restricted to trees, and a range of variants
around "shoe" are used for virtually any shoe of any size or type
(although a few times she has seemed to produce a distinct "sah" sound
for socks).  "Cheh/chee" is either cheese or cheerios or both.
Interesting, there seem to be no sounds corresponding to flower, brush
or telephone, for which she has such well established gestures--even
though she is inundated with modelling of words for both referents.
Is it possible that the appearance of the difficult s/f sounds in
these words causes her to avoid the vocal forms?

The hi/bye waving gesture has resurfaced, used as widely as it was
over a month ago, but I am less clear whether she is producing the
corresponding sounds.  The sound "nai" (nice?) has been produced while
patting/ stroking and also without the corresponding gesture, but I
feel fairly unsure about the distribution of this still infrequent
complex.


 Today Julia was left with two new teenage babysitters to play with
Susanna, in the downstairs laboratory, while we met upstairs.  In our
morning confusion, we had packed canned formula but neglected to pack
a bottle, nor did we put any other kind of food in her diaper bag.  We
are told that Julia cried on and off from eleven to noon, pointing
repeatedly at her diaper bag.  When the girls finally gave her a
couple of crackers, she consumed them so voraciously that it is
obvious she was hungry.  She was, then, trying to convince them to
take food or formula from the diaper bag where it is usually kept on
outings.

 Perhaps the most important yet vague observation that I have
concerning the last week is one that I have heard repeatedly from
mothers in our own research: "My child suddenly seems to understand
almost everything."  I think that this impression stems not so much
from an increase in the child's actual receptive vocabulary (although
this is undoubtedly involved), so much as a new level of understanding
of the comprehension game.  There have been several cases in the last
few days in which Virginia or I have tried to elicit comprehension of
combinations with new verbs, or in new contexts.  Julia often gets it
"wrong", but is clearly following a deliberate problem-solving
strategy in response to our efforts: looking around, picking up nearby
objects and giving them to us, or doing something that is
characteristically done with those objects (especially if that known
object was named in the command).  If I say to her "Let's go get/find
(person's name)" or "Let's go have dinner", or whatever, she gets up
and starts to follow me with a very intent and puzzled look.
Sometimes she seems to "click", as though she thinks she has figured
out what I intend for us to do, and she takes off in the direction of
the kitchen, or the bathroom, or a room where the target person or
thing is likely to be found.  It is, then, this new level of
cooperation in communication that gives the strongest impression of
understanding--even if her guesses are wrong as often as they are
right!

4/18/84.  I have several new anecdotes from the last couple of days.
First, yesterday Julia was playing around the dishwasher as I tried to
fill it and keep her from dangerous objects at the same time.  I
finally banished her to the living room, with her father's help.  Her
solution to my solution was the following: she picked up two of her
toy teacups in the living room, carried them quite deliberately into
the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher.

There may also be another repercussion of Julia's encounter with
Susanna.  Susanna had been frequently observed (by us as well as her
parents) producing what appears to be a nonsense gesture of dabbing
her right index finger into her left palm.  If there is any
systematicity to this gesture at all, it corresponds roughly to
Julia's "dis", an all-purpose comment on something of interest.
Within a few days of her two long mornings of play with Susanna, I
observed Julia herself making this same gesture.  It disappeared
shortly never to be seen again.  It is difficult to explain this odd
gesture as anything other than a deferred imitation.

This morning, after drinking her bottle in bed with us, Julia wandered
into her bedroom, opened her dresser drawer, and pulled out a
nightgown.  She managed to get it partially over her head, so that her
face was sticking out nun- like while the rest still covered the top
of her head.  With this accomplished, she proudly walked in to show us
and simultaneously said "ayse"--which is, I think, a new usage of the
word "nice".  Around the same time, she was walking around with a
clenched fist held in front of her as if she were carrying a
non-existent object.  Her father said "What have you got there?", and
she walked over and "put" the non-existent object into his hand.  I
discussed this example with Tony, who raised the possibility that she
really had originally picked up a solid something, perhaps a crumb or
bit or lint, which was lost in the transfer process.  Unless/until I
see other examples, that possibility is certainly viable.

 4/19/84.  Virginia went back to Rome today, and the house is settling
back down to a more mundane routine.  Julia, who had a slight fever
last night, stayed home a little longer than usual to play with us
this morning, so we could be sure whether she should go out or not.
She was cheerful albeit a bit subdued, and exceptionally affectionate,
as we sat around in the living room playing more comprehension games.
This provided still more evidence for the "problem-solving" nature of
her current comprehension.  I asked her to "get the spoon", which she
did after a careful search in the surrounding forest of toys.  Then,
without pointing to Daddy's huge and rather obvious shoe nearby, I
said "Put the spoon in the shoe"--which she did with little
hesitation.  Then I said "Put the spoon in the bottle."  Her baby
bottle was right before her eyes--but then, of course, it is certainly
not shaped like a likely recipient for spoons, having no obvious large
holes for spoon placement.  She hesitated quite a while, looking
confused, and then picked up the bottle and put it in the shoe.  I
also asked her to "Give the block to Daddy", fully aware that the word
"block" is probably not in her receptive vocabulary.  Even though the
block was the most ideally placed object at the time, right before her
eyes, she stared around with an intent expression and finally reached
over and pointed at the pile of books in the toy box.  She apparently
went to work on the sound pattern in the word "block" to extract
"book" as the most likely candidate.

4/21/84.  Julia finally has a two-syllable word: BABA, applied to baby
bottles.  The same day this was confirmed independently by us and by
Cindy, she also attempted her first imitation and subsequent naming of
"apple"--pronounced "BAPPA".  I'm beginning to be convinced that the
ever-increasing homophony in Julia's phonological system is no
accident, i.e.  that she is trying at some level to impose a principle
of economy, using the fewest possible sounds for the largest possible
set of referents.  The "Bah/beh/buh/" example was mentioned earlier
(at that time, for bird, bottle, bear, baby, etc.).  Now that the
reduplicative version has emerged and quickly differentiated, I'm even
more convinced that some kind of conservative strategy is involved.
"Dah" is now being used for daddy (and sometimes me), dog and just
recently for "down".  The words for "shoes, "juice" and "cheese" are
sounding more alike all the time, although she seems perfectly aware
of the distinction as judged from appropriateness of use.

On the other hand, I'm becoming more aware of play with multisyllabic
forms under single and varied intonation contours.  One that I failed
to note emerged temporarily a couple of weeks ago: a string of
consonant-vowel combinations using C, D, G, B plus variation between
"ah" and "oi" vowels, all uttered in the same high tone (e.g.
"OIGADOIGADOIGABOI..."), ending with a long glide down on an open "ah"
vowel.  This occurred consistently for several days, usually while she
sat in the back of the car, and sounded for all the world like
"conversational scribbling."  Then it disappeared.  Nothing else quite
so consistent has followed, but there is definitely more long and
varied babbling now.


 4/22/84.  EASTER DAY.  Since the block episode reported the other
day, Julia seems to have added blocks to the set of referents referred
to with the ubiquitous "ba" monosyllable.  However, George swears that
the various BAs are indeed starting to differentiate by referent
class; in particular, birds are marked with something more like a
"buh".  He may be right, but if so the data are probabilistic at best.

A new event is the tendency for her to try and name things with
something very like a questioning intonation, looking straight at me
as if for confirmation.  A particularly interesting exchange in this
regard occurred in the car yesterday, waiting for George to come out
of the postoffice.  Trying to forestall an impatient tantrum, I kept
pointing out pigeons and other birds flying nearby from roofs to wires
to ground.  At first she kept providing the usual label "buh".  I kept
repeating with very clear and even caricatured enunciation "BIRD",
stressing the last phoneme in particular.  She starting to stare at
me, and back at the birds, and said "dah" several times.  Fearful of
having caused backsliding, I repeated "bird" stressing the first
letter.  She looked at me intently and pressed her lips together twice
in a sustained start of a "b", and alternated back and forth between
"ba" and "da" for a minute or two.  I continued to provide a clearly
enunciated "BIRD", and at one point she seemed to pick up on neither
the first nor the final consonant, but on the medial sound pattern,
saying "r/wa" several times.  I take this as further evidence of a new
and explicit interest in phonological analysis, at a level as close to
consciousness as anything else that Julia does.


4/25/84.  The BAPPA term that came in a few days ago is now used
reliably for naming apples, requesting apples before she even sees
them when the referigerator is opened, and for naming/requesting large
round and presumably edible objects (including oranges and potatoes,
i.e.  the famous "bappa-de- terre" or "ardenbappa").  It's interesting
that BAPPA refers only to edible round things, while BA (ball?)  is
used reliably for balls and balloons.  George thinks (though he is not
sure) that she also applied BAPPA to her small meatballs at dinner
last night.

 Julia is also more likely now to name daddy with the bisyllabic DADA,
although DA is still common.  So the principle of duplication to
achieve meaning contrasts seems to be proliferating.

The hand-to-ear telephone gesture and the flower-sniffing gesture have
both recurred several times, at a distance from the object and/or in
response to pictures, so these really seem fairly well established as
"names" in the gestural modality.  However, I have not noticed any new
additions to her gestural repertoire--except perhaps if we want to
count a new and quite deliberate scheme of "adult-like sitting".  She
likes to climb into/onto chairs and sit at the edge with her legs
dangling over, kicking them back and forth, and laughing as though
this were a very clever thing to do.  In fact, she will now quite
deliberately "Sit" on an array of flat surfaces raised from the
ground, including her play pegboard workbench and the large flat
pillow in our living room.  This activity seems quite distinct from
"sitting-itself" or plain old sitting, in part because she looks so
unmistakably smug and pleased upon doing it.

George had two observations last night.  First, around 7:15 (while I
was gone) he had yet to make a move toward her evening bath,
contemplating skipping it altogether and putting her to bed at 7:30 as
usual.  Quite on her own, without provocation, Julia got up and stood
between the living room and bathroom, looking and George and pointing
repeatedly toward the bathroom saying "dis" and "bah".  When he
finally got up and said "Okay, do you want your bath?" she laughed and
ran into the bathroom.  The other observation occurred during play.
The two of them had been playing tea party, stirring with spoons in
cups back and forth, feeding each other with spoon and cup, etc.  At
one point, Julia picked up her baby bottle and began quite intently
and systematically stirring the spoon around the top of the nipple.
There seem to me to be only two explanations for this behavior.
Either she had generalized the stirring gesture from cup to bottle via
some semantic principle of liquid/drinking, or she was responding to
my suggestion four days earlier to "Put the spoon in the bottle" (see
above).

  4/28/84.  BABA is proliferating: it is now used for BALLOON, BABY,
SHEEP (with a slightly different vowel, a shorter "a" as in "how does
the sheep go?"), as well as for BOTTLE, and perhaps, for BELLYBUTTON
(although on that one she alternates between BABA and BEH).  It looks
as though she has now split the ubiquitous BA into a monosyllable form
and a multisyllabic form, corresponding to the metric properties of
the target word.  Meanwhile, I still think her parsimony theory is at
work on other aspects of the lexicon.  The convergence of SHOES,
CHEESE, JUICE and maybe CHEERIOS into a single sound something like
CHISS or SHISS has now been extended to shirts, sweaters and
nightgowns--probably with SHIRT as the target.  On the other hand,
George seems to hear more instances of differentiation.  For example,
it seemed to me that the word HORSIE was also at risk for falling into
the cheese-complex (pronounced SHEE for a while); but George heard two
very clear renditions of HORSH while I was gone to New Orleans
overnight.  Also, some of her stabs at JUICE are getting much clearer
now.  (She seems to get confused sometimes and refer to liquids in
cups as BABA, perhaps indicating some kind of recognition that good
liquids belong in the same category regardless of receptacle).  When I
came in to her bedroom to get her this morning she kept pointing
toward the door and saying BABA over and over again, then said BABA
and picked up the tiny bottle of tylenol drops (with a squeeze-dropper
top) saying BABA and trying to suck from the top.  Her repeated
requests didn't stop until we left the bedroom and I handed her the
long-sought bottle.

While I was gone, George reports that Julia stepped into his giant
slippers and actually managed to walk across the room in them.  She
also had another long shoe episode that evening, disappearing into our
big closet and coming out with one Daddy Shoe after another, putting
them at his feet one at a time.  When that compilation was complete,
she went off into her own room to the shelf where her own shoes are
kept and starting bringing those out.  Could we say that this is
categorization of a sort, persistent albeit uncomplicated?

The bye wave now has an Italian ciao-like hi gesture as its
reciprocal.  This is used in waving to people, in response to the word
hi, and in a fairly unspecified set of conditions of joy, greeting,
and putting FP people to bed or into the barn. Also, there is now a
reciprocal head nod for the already established head shake.  Whereas
the shake is a reliable cue that Julia is contemplating naughtiness
(of various kinds), the head nod seems to accompany earnest plans
(like trying to fit blocks into the top of her shapebox) that are in
turn marked by clapping if she is successful.  A good example of the
naughtiness gesture came today, when Julia picked up an old orange
peel and repeatedly put it to her wide open mouth, looked at her
father, shook her head, laughed, and went through the ritual again.
She will now also imitate my "BLAH!"  and disgust gesture with mouth
and tongue when tasting something she doesn't like, or an old piece of
discarded food that I don't want her to eat.

Yesterday she picked up a picture of herself as an infant, inside of a
tiny flowered china frame.  She said "BABA" (more like BEHBEH) to the
picture, and then applied her sniffing gesture to the tiny painted
flowers on the rim.

4/30/84.  Julia now has the sound CACACA for roosters and chickens,
presumably her version of cockadoodledoo.  CAH is still the sound for
cars, and CAH and CAHCAH are used for cookies and crackers in an
unsystematic way.  But the rooster/chicken sound seems almost
invariably to have three syllables--her first!


Tonight she became preoccupied with my keys--and old favorite, but at
a new level this time.  First she approached me holding one key out
from the ring much as I usually approach a door.  I took her cue, and
started a game of "locking" and "unlocking" the door of her toy barn.
We also went outside to the porch and slowly and carefully inserted
the housekey in the lock and turned it before going back in.  This set
off a lengthy bout of locking and unlocking by Julia on her toy barn,
putting things in before locking up, getting them back out, etc.  She
never did say the word KEY during all this, although I think I have
heard her say it (something like the plural KEESH) on several other
occasions.

There was also a nice extension of tea party tonight.  George had
filled and closed his thermos, ready to set off for a late evening at
the office.  The thermos is a very new object in her environment, but
she seemed to recognize the handle on the side and understand
something about its function.  After first treating it more like a
bottle (sucking at the top) she then held it by the handle and seemed,
despite its considerable weight, to try and pour.  I put out a round
block as a cup and asked her to "pour me some coffee."  She had a
difficult time, sort of pushing the thermos against my hand, so I
modelled pouring into the block and drinking from it.  She also
"drank" from the round block with gusto and sound effects and did a
more creditable job of pouring herself.  Then, she brought the thermos
over to the doll on the floor and "poured" more or less into its
mouth.  I switched the game soon thereafter, and modelled brushing my
hair with the same round block.  She stared at me, and I did it again,
saying the word "brush".  She then immediately picked up another
cylindrical block and brushed her own hair with it.  I then tried to
get her to hug the block, but she lost interest.

Last night Julia fell over on the bed against the corner of her toy
barn, and cried hard for several minutes while I held her.  I went
through the antics of smacking the corner of the barn and saying
"bad!".  This seemed to interest her, although she did not follow my
aggressive lead.  Instead, a few moments later she very carefully
placed her forehead against that same corner, twice, very softly, as
if she were trying to reenact the accident.

Julia's comprehension of body part names is increasing.  She will
respond with considerable systematicity, on her own body or someone
else's (albeit not always the body requested) to NOSE, EYE, EAR,
MOUTH, BELLYBUTTON, and HAIR. She also quite definitely says EYE now
while touching my eyes or her fathers, or the eyes of some toy
animal--but not, interestingly, her own eyes (which, of course, she
cannot see....).  I'm not sure yet whether she says NOSE, but thought
I had heard it a couple of times.  So far as I can tell, she doesn't
say either EAR, HAIR or MOUTH yet.  Also, the word for eye usually
sounds plural as in "EYSH"--as though, via the kind of phonological
economy she has been practicing lately, this one grows out of the
pre-existing term AYSE for NICE.

This morning I heard Julia saying BABA to herself in bed upon waking
up.  This is the first time I've been able to recognize any of her
actual words in cribspeech.  I don't think this was mere babbling,
given its clear and deliberate nature-- and the fact that bottles are
always the first thing on her mind and the first thing mentioned to me
at that hour of the morning.


 5/2/84.  Julia now understands the word "toes", immediately
generalized in comprehension to all human and doll toes.  I seem to
have heard her try to say it as well, but need further evidence to be
sure.  She also responded yesterday to "Where's the dolly's
bellybutton?" by pulling up the doll's dress in search of the
miniscule would-be umbilical.  Usually when she tries to say
BELLYBUTTON her version is either the monosyllable BEH or a bisyllabic
BAHBEH.  Yesterday, however, after I kept repeating "bellybutton" very
clearly, she looked straight at me and said CACACA.  Since this word
(for rooster) is her only current trisyllabic word, it is interesting
to consider whether she offered it in an effort to match the lengthy
four-syllable model with the longest word in her repertoire.

 This morning I asked her to PUT THE CIUCCIO ON THE TV.  She found the
command quite confusing, looking at the TV and walking over to it but
not quite knowing what to do next.  George and I kept repeating the
command, and she eventually just held the ciuccio up against the TV
screen.

Pouring, feeding, drinking, holding cups and pitchers up to dolls'
mouths, are favorite and frequent activities right now, requiring no
modelling or verbal suggestion.  She also initiates the game of naming
bodyparts quite often, particularly by sticking her finger in my eye
and saying "EYE", pulling up my blouse and trying to find the
bellybutton (no easy matter these days).  I tried to get her to say
MOUTH yesterday, and she studied my lips very carefully while pressing
her own lips together.  I haven't noted spontaneous production yet of
this or any other word beginning with M other than the general lament
MAMAMA (which has an interesting and seemingly more playful "fake
unhappy" version something like MINAMINAMINAMINAMIN).

 There is something rather like a sign combination now, in which Julia
waves, then points, then waves at an interesting person or object on
the horizon.  Presumably, by Virginia's criteria, this is a
combination of deictic gestures.  It is, however, quite smoothly
executed with no hesitation between gestures.

5/3/84.  Julia's ability to segment words in comprehension seems to
have hit some kind of new level now, insofar as she can pull familiar
words out of a stream without special focus or intonation.  Case in
point: tonight I gave her some boned chicken to eat and asked
something like "Did you eat any of the chicken this time?".  Although
she didn't appear to be paying any attention to me, she began to say
CACACA (which apparently is a response to both rooster and
chicken--and perhaps duck, if so indicating a conflation of
cockadoodledoo and quaquaqua around a common class of "big funny and
non-prototypic birds").  Similarly, if she hears me say "bottle" or
"juice" in any context, including conversation to another adult, it
seems to set her off.  (Along the same lines, but visual rather than
auditory, she saw an extremely small picture of a bottle being drunk
by an infant in a new picture book this evening.  First she tried to
pluck the bottle off the page.  Later on, returning to the same page,
she got up demanding BABA and walked toward the kitchen pointing.)  In
another pair of examples, I said sentences containing the word "no",
to which Julia responded (inappropriately, given the context in which
the sound "no" was embedded) by shaking her head back and forth.  In
yet another instance, George said "I'll bet she would have liked the
ice cream."  Julia apparently tuned into the word "ice", looked up and
said "eyes" (a big favorite for a couple of days now).

We were on a short walk outside this evening, watching cars and trucks
go up the street.  She said "car" (CAH) spontaneously several times.
When a large and impressive truck passed I repeated "truck" several
times, and she seemed (for once) to try and imitate with something
like "tuh", and another effort something like "uck" (note that the
sound "truck" presents something of a challenge to her current
simplified phonological system, so this is a particularly novel effort
on her part).  I'm anxious to see if this word spreads as quickly as
others seem to once they are acquired.  If principles of "phonological
assimilation and avoidance" are still at work here, "truck" probably
won't take for a while.

5/5/84.  This morning Julia was sitting in my lap watching her father
use the phone.  She herself had been playing with the phone a while
earlier, while I tried to make a call.  Several times she put her hand
to her ear in what seems to be a regular gestural name for phone now.
Then she turned to the dresser next to the bed, pointed at my tiny
pocket calculator, and made the phone gesture again.  This display was
then repeated.  I was momentarily stumped, saying "What do you want?"
Then I realized that she was probably over- generalizing her phone
gesture in response to the push buttons on the calculator.  I am so
used to thinking of phones in rotary terms, despite the fact that we
don't even have one in the house, that the similarity between the
calculator and our pushbutton phone hadn't even occurred to me.

Today Julia seemed to be "branching out" a bit in her conservative
phonological system, trying at last to say some two-syllable words
with contrasting consonant-vowel combinations.  In a long encounter
with the dog next door, while we stood chatting with the neighbors,
she tried saying "doggie" about eleven different ways; however,
several of them sounded like "gahgee" or "dahgee".  On the other hand,
her sound "cacaca" has split off into another sound, "cococo", and as
far as I can tell, she is trying to use both for almost
everything--including barking dogs and sounds of birds in the
distance, and a wide array of things that I can't decode at all.  So
her urge to economize the sound system is still at work.

She has also learned to affect a new sense of dialogue by judicious
use of head nods and headshakes in answer to questions.  Sometimes it
really seems appropriate, as if she has processed my entire sentence.
For example, last night I said "do you want to have your bottle now",
and she nodded fiercely and ran for the kitchen.  Other times,
however, her nods and shakes have nothing at all to do with the
message (in fact I wasn't even asking a question) and make it look
like she was just guessing.  It does, however, make things feel very
different for me, as if I finally have an interlocutor here.

5/8/84.  Julia's abilities to "overhear" her best- established words
have gotten so good that I've now taken to spelling the words
"bottle", "juice" and "apple" if I don't want to set off a frantic run
for the kitchen.

On the production side, of course contrary to my predictions, Julia is
doing pretty well now with the word "truck" (pronounced something like
"uck")--although this is the first consonant-final entry in her
system.  George thinks that this comes from a little boy that Cindy
has been babysitting for a few hours a day, a child whose sole purpose
in life seems to be monitoring the environment for trucks and
commenting on their existence.  Meanwhile, she is experimenting madly
with words for doggy: from the original "dah", to the occasional
"cococo" (trying out the boundaries of the rooster category?)  to the
more recent "gagaga" and "gahgee".  She's also tried to say "cat" a
number of times with prompting, but her first try upon seeing a live
cat is usually "gahgee".  After our Sunday trip to the zoo, she seems
to be trying to say "elephant" with a vague aim at the fricative (e.g.
"ahfa").  Similarly, while hugging baby Ben this morning (whom she
reliably calls "beh" or "baba") she gave a very clear "huh" sound
which Cindy interpreted as "hug".  So new phonemes are trying to come
in.


 Julia's buddy Walt at Cindy's house is introducing aggression into
our lives, with regular efforts to bite Julia.  She has not, thank
God, responded in kind yet.  However, George really thinks she eggs
him on by offering toys and pulling them away before he takes them,
etc.  The literature would suggest that boys are only OVERTLY more
aggressive than girls; girls are in fact sneakier.  I hate to say it,
but it may be true.  Now, when she's frustrated, Julia has a bag of
unpleasant little tricks for us too.  Last night I picked her up to
bring her in against her will, holding her against me facing forward,
and she reached behind and yanked out my earring with uncanny aim, and
put it proudly in her mouth.  I took it back and she then yanked the
other one out.  Before I fiinally got her in the house, she managed to
reach up (again not able to see me because of her position) and get my
dark glasses and throw them to the ground.  I guess she told me!!  One
could muse about the kind of body representation she must have to
accomplish this act of aggression with such skill (i.e. virtually no
need to adjust her well- planned aim...).  But I'm not sure this is
the message to take home....






























































                          JULIANOTES 3

5/13/84.  Julia is now 13.5 months old, the upper end for our last
longitudinal studies of one-year-olds at Colorado.  I therefore
administered our old interview wordlist to myself this week, and got
the following count: 34 productive words counting items sustained by
"weak" evidence; 27 of these are common nouns; 18 are solidly
established and flexible in their range of use.  Actually, a few more
seem to have popped up since that count.  However, perhaps the most
striking "new" insight I have from keeping track of these things--at
least in Julia--is that very few of these words are really "online" in
any given 1 - 2 week period.  Nothing seems to leave her comprehension
repertoire, but virtually everything seems to drop out after a while
in production.

Cindy has heard J say "water" fairly clearly, more than once, although
I have no corresponding evidence.  George has heard it too.  This must
be context-dependent: J loves the little water fountain (for bottled
water) at Cindy's house, which accounts for her frequent naming there;
with her father, she loves to go out and water the lawn.  Me?  I can
usually be counted on to provide "juice" and "bottle", so why bother
with water?  She now says "applejuice" with remarkable clarity, but
seems a bit confused about how this differs from juice or even liquids
in general.  In fact, sometimes she just likes to stand there and say
it as though she realizes this is a phonological high point in her
development and just wants to show off.

Although she is still not an avid imitator, there are far more
examples than before of J trying to repeat something new or old after
me--with great concentration, and usually with a variety of
permutations of the sounds I provide (as though she is studying the
parts).  A good example yesterday was "allgone", which I said in a
sing-song voice and J repeated ("ahgah") complete with intonation.
More practice with this sound has followed since then.

 Her gestural repertoire is increasing.  Among the life activities
that have entered into her play are "pretend sleeping" (to any pillow,
folded blanket, or square of cloth), "diapering" (consisting so far
only of carefully opening and smoothing the diaper out, placing it in
position--no one has benefited from J's diaper activity so far),
"driving" (with the little steering wheel that George attached to the
back of the seat in front of her), and the full set of events
associated with watering the lawn.  This watering scheme includes
"pretend watering" with the telephone cord on one clear occasion.
Hugging/patting/kissing have proliferated to human and non-human,
animate and toy animate beings of all kinds (e.g.  the roman statue in
the backyard).  In a store last week, George let her play with a toy
shopping cart--which she pushed down the aisle, taking objects off
shelves and placing them in the cart.  We've tried to introduce her to
her toothbrush, but after one brief effort to apply it to her mouth,
she insisted that a "brush is a brush" and applies it exclusively to
her hair.  (5/20/84--she has now put her toothbrush into her mouth
spontaneously on several occasions, including one instance in which
she repeatedly dipped it into the running water from the faucet and
placed it in her mouth to suck the water off).  Today when George and
I were trying to read the Sunday paper, she went out to the living
room and brought back one of her own books, climbing up on the bed and
sitting there "reading" with us.

In general, her interest and participation in book-reading is
increasing again.  Now, when I ask her "Where's the X?", she points to
something (even if it is often the wrong thing) fairly reliably--so,
at least, she understands the point of that game.  Correct points have
included not only shoes, hats, lions, elephants, dogs and babies, but
also the window and the lamp in her Richard Scarry book.  The last two
were surprises for me since I didn't know they were in her repertoire.
Also, when I name one of her animals or best known objects in a book,
she will sometimes point to it and repeat the name.

 5/20/84.  There have been three examples of gestural naming to
pictures in books, all of them involving the unseeable region around
Julia's head: telephone (hand to ear), brush (closed or partially
closed hand moving across the top of the head) and hat (open palm
patting the top of her head).  The hat gesture is now sometimes
accompanied by the word "hat".  I have also seen her give both the hat
word and the hat gesture to brand new hats never before encountered.
So this is a very clear first example of a gesture/word equivalent
other than general deictics like pointing and "dis".  In that regard,
it is interesting that the game "hat", at seven months of age, was her
very first conventional routine, long before bye-bye or pattycake ever
appeared.

 Her open-and-shut bye-bye gesture has taken on a whole new range of
uses: all purpose interest and excitement, greeting (sometimes
indistinguishable from interest/excitement except that she may also
say "hi"), and requests.  The gesture is, also, often executed in a
sequence with pointing.  Because she does often say "hi" and perform
this gesture at the same time, this constitutes another word/gesture
equivalent (although it is deictic rather than referential by
Virginia's criteria).

Julia seems genuinely thrilled that language works.  Today when we
were sitting cuddling in the living room after her nap, she suddenly
got up and looked me in the eye and said "baba".  I asked "Do you want
your bottle?"  and got up to go to the kitchen and she started to
laugh uproariously and clap.  I can't exactly explain why, but this
seemed like more than the usual pleasure over the coming bottle
(which, in fact, is more often a frustrated and insistent whine as she
follows me to the kitchen).

The "ahguh" rendition of "allgone" has generalized very quickly.  She
now says it spontaneously whenever a bottle has been emptied
(sometimes holding it upside down and shaking it at the same time),
and similarly when a cup is empty at mealtimes.  Today she held a toy
cup (which had had no liquid in it) upside down and said "ahgoo".
More than once, she has made a funny empty-handed shaking gesture that
looks a little like holding a vessicle upside down and shaking
it--while saying "ahguh" to a cup or bottle that is out of reach.  If
I'm correct about this gesture, than we have evidence for another
word/gesture equivalent.

 Julia "chatters" all the time now, but usually in a reliable phonetic
pattern, something like "abiddabah" or "abadaba".  I wonder whether
this is not derived somehow from her proud "applejuice" performance
last week; this performance had gotten further and further removed
from the context of real applejuice, turning into a kind of showing
off that might well have come entirely off its base!!  Another bit of
jargon revolves around something like "gahgahgah" in various prosodic
patterns.  This last one is interesting because the more obviously
"meaningful" term GAHGAH has generalized quite reliably now to dogs,
cats, and a variety of less clearcut cases of animate beings.  Also,
there is a sound that is only marginally different (and sometimes not
different at all) that resembles GAHCUH which is now used for all
trucks and large vehicles, oddly shaped moving machines (including a
pedicab at the zoo this morning), and garden hose.  She has also made
this sound while pointing outside (at the back or the front of the
house) in an apparent request to go outside.

This morning Julia seemed to say "AHGAH BABA" with an odd suffix at
the end that I couldn't quite understand.  I was quite excited at the
possibility that she was trying to say her first "sentence", i.e.
"allgone bottle", particularly because she was pointing at her empty
bottle at the time, and because this new meaning now seems so well
established.  However, I'm beginning to think that she was saying
"allgone" followed immediately within the same prosodic pattern by her
babble-string described above (i.e.  "AHGAH babiddabah").  In either
case, she is clearly coming closer to trying to approximate a sentence
contour, inserting at least one meaningful word.

Julia took my pen from me this afternoon and pretended quite
deliberately to "write" all over a term paper that I had just graded
(fortunately for the student, the cap was over the tip of the pen).
She then brought the pen over and set it on the table next to me.
While she wasn't looking, I took the pen and placed it out of sight.
A few moments later she returned to the table and looked very puzzled,
then maneuvered around a set of obstacles to come over to me and look
in my lap.  I think this might be an instance of "inferring an
invisible displacement", i.e. "You must have been the one that took
it...."  If so, that is quite interesting, since the literature
suggests that this ability is reliably associated with the first
productive use of the word "allgone". On the other hand, I was the one
who had the pen originally (although I had been seated somewhere else
at the time), so this might just have been a case of going back to the
original source when something is lost.  I may try a few more hiding
games in the next few days to see how extensive the invisible
displacement phenomenon is right now.  We have had a couple more
comprehension festivals.  Last night I got her to "put the baby in the
playpen", "put the little man in the stroller", and "put the people in
the car" (the car in this case being a plain cardboard box that she
had been moving around the floor).  On a whim, I asked her to "read
the book to the baby".  She looked around and picked up a newsprint
flyer (nice generalization from "book", I assume) but then became
somewhat confused and ultimately took the flyer over to her father.
She brought me a fragment of cracker to see, and I told her "there's a
cookie by the TV".  She went over to the TV and picked up the cookie,
and brought it back to me.  Immediately after that, she picked up the
cookie and the cracker fragment and walked back across the room to
place them neatly on the television table.  Several times she has
picked up napkins or babywipes and spontaneously wiped up nonexistent
drops on the floor (as well as the frequent real drops).  Today I
asked her to "wipe the window" when she was standing near the glass
panes of the door looking outside.  This one didn't seem to work at
all, although she stared at me for a very long time.  (Speaking of
wiping, for the first time today she tried to "help" me change her
diaper, by picking up a kleenex and applying it to her own vagina as I
leaned over to get a fresh diaper).

5/22/84.  There seems to be another albeit somewhat nebulous addition
to Julia's understanding of "the language game".  It now seems to be
the case that talking calms her more than singing (e.g. if she is
crying in the back of the car), but the only way that works is if I
use a very exaggerated prosody and insert a lot of the words that she
knows.  Similarly, I used to read her books by ignoring the text
altogether and just pointing out objects and naming them.  Now she
seems to enjoy listening to me read the text, instead of impatiently
pushing ahead to the next page if I try to read.  I find it
interesting that this new pleasure in connected discourse is happening
around the same time that she has dramatically increased her
jargon-like chattering-- as though she is now trying to "sound like
sentences", precisely because she now enjoys listening to sentences.
There may be some unifying development in her ability to segment
speech responsible for both changes.

I am still "dada", at least in production.  If she is asked to "give X
to daddy" she invariably goes to her father; and if asked "Where's
mommy?" or "take that to mommy" she pretty reliably goes to me.  And
yet, when she sees me coming into view she very typically smiles,
laughs and cries out "dada!"  Perhaps this is a "general delight
sound"--except that she is much less likely to use that word for other
people and/or other interesting objects and events.  So I'm still
inclined to think that "dada" means "parent", but that her father is
the prototypic member of the parent class.  In fact, if there is any
sound that is more often associated with me than with her father, it
is now "baba"--based, I think, on the fact that she calls the breast
as well as bottles "baba".

 5/25/84.  This morning Julia looked at the telephone, said "teyyoo",
picked it up and put it to her shoulder/ear area with the right hand,
and reached out and waved (with her open-shut gesture) while saying
"hi".

Yesterday I tried to get her to brush her hair with a toy spoon.  She
wouldn't brush her own hair, but did try to brush mine.  I also tried
to get her to "drink" from a toy car.  She held the car to her mouth
and repeated my "mmm!" sound.

The allgone word has generalized from cups and bottles to other kinds
of finish/disappear notions, e.g.  dropping a cheerio from her
highchair.  There are also frequent uses during play that I can't
decode at all; I don't know whether they are simply babbles, or
comments on disappearances/displacements that are just not obvious to
me.

 J definitely has the word "hot".  She applies it to the stove, to hot
cups of coffee in my hand, and to bits of hot food placed on her tray.
She reacts to the word "pretty" in a stereotypic way: placing her hand
up on her head and feeling for her barrette-- apparently because we so
often say "You're so pretty!"  after putting in her barrette.

6/2/84.  A few days ago I put two flat cylindrical wheel-like blocks
on either side of a plastic stick and handed this abstract form to J
to see what she would do.  Her first reaction was to hold one flat end
to her nose and sniff, saying something like "towah" (flower?).  I
modelled telephoning with it, and she promptly complied.  I also
managed to elicit a third scheme from the same object by modelling
hairbrushing.  However, when I tried a fourth permutation, pushing the
stick through one end and treating like a bottle, she lost interest.
The next day, when she saw the same construction, she picked it up and
carried out the telephone gesture.

Julia's word system has collapsed again: almost everything is named
the last few days with the single sound "gahgah", except for balls,
bottles, bears, babies (all reliably "baba"), parents (dada) and a few
old reliables like "hi", "shoe", "juice".  "Allgone" is still a
special favorite, however, including some applications in play (e.g.
while feeding a fischerprice person in its toy highchair).  And yet
even that is at risk for falling into the blackhole of GAHGAH these
days.

 Meanwhile, Cindy says that J now quite clearly goes about saying her
own name, and saying "mommy"-- although the context for the latter is
unclear.  I've seen her say both "my" (while taking/walking away with
a treasure) and have also heard a lot of "mommy" the last few days.
However, both of these words have occurred while Julia was (for the
first time) pointing at her own chest.  There have been several
occasions in which, trying to work through J's confusion over parental
terminology (and probably, given our lifestyle, parents as well), I
have pointed to myself and said "I'm mommy" while pointing at her
father and saying "that's daddy".  It may just be that she has
analyzed point-at-chest and "mommy" as a matched set, turning them
back to us just as she found them!

More evidence for comprehension, of the following items: "fish" (in
books or to real fish), "purse" (in books or in real life--she has
also tried several times now to put my purse over her shoulder and
walk away with it), "butterfly" (so far only in books, but several of
them), "cup", "spoon", "highchair", "pants", "shirt", "bunny",
"turtle", "duck", "girl", and many of the old favorites--all in the
evening pastime of pointing in books in answer to my requests.

Also some new symbolic play items.  When J took part in an experiment
at UCSD a couple of days ago, during free play with items for the
subsequent test she was handed a toothbrush (which she now knows all
about and plays at all the time) and toothpaste (which she has never
held in her hands before as far as I know).  She immediately pretended
to spread paste from the tube on the brush and brush her teeth with
it.  Also, J has done a lot of caretaker play in the last week.  She
diapered her bear successfully (with a little help from me), put a
bunny in a shoebox and carefully brought it into another room and set
it quietly in the corner, and put a doll in the swing outside and
tried to swing it at Cindy's house.  I've seen various efforts to wrap
dolls and fisherprice people in cloths and papers, although the target
task was not obvious.


 When Barbara babysat for J last week, she had (at my urging) tried to
forego the usual evening bath and just wash Julia off with a cloth in
the bathroom.  Julia whined and pointed insistently into the tub until
Barbara finally relented and gave her the usual bath.  Life routines
are, obviously, getting quite established now.

Julia seems to use her right hand more and more of the time lately,
including the execution of her first artwork last week (several red
streaks on a piece of yellow paper....)  The right hand seems to be
the one used in empty- handed symbolic gestures and in
pointing--although this may not be new, since it is a problem I've
started to think more about lately, and have only begun to watch
systematically.

George thinks that J has a gestural "name" for horses and rocking
chairs, which involves a jerky up-and-now motion with bended knees.
She will even do this for pictures of horses in a book.


6/4/84.  Julia spent about ten minutes tonight insistently diapering
and rediapering a two-inch FischerPrice baby inside one of her own
(comparatively) mammoth diapers.  This included hugging the diapered
baby a couple of times in between.  She also took the baby into the
bathtub with her and washed it thoroughly with a washcloth, then took
the washcloth and wrapped the baby in it holding it to her chest in
much the same way that we wrap her in a large towel and hold her to
our chests at the end of the bath.  Later she was putting FP people in
and out of one of her shoes.  I took the shoe, thus peopled, and said
"This is a car.  Vrooom!" while scooting the shoe around the floor.
She repeated the vroom sound and scooted the shoe around herself.  I
said "Is that a car?"  She answered "cahcah" and went rooting around
in her toybox for a set of small wheels connected to a flat frame
(which once housed a small chocolate vehicle on top), pushing that
around the floor and saying "vroom".  After that, she pulled out a red
wooden car and repeated the performance.  Later on, in her bedroom,
the same push/vroom sequence was executed with her FP bus, after she
had carefully positioned the FP baby inside.  I think this is the
first time she has used the "vroom" sound, so it is interesting that
the generalization was so rapid.  She also went over to her shelf of
toy animals tonight and pulled out a handpuppet of a dog, placed her
hand correctly inside, came over to me and seemed to try and "bite" my
finger with the dog.  On the other hand, after all this virtuoso
symbolic activity, we tried to work a jigsaw puzzle and she performed
well below her own peak level at ten months.  Curious.  Her total
disinterest in towers and other construction activities is also
curious, given her quite sterling performance in such combinatorial
activities around 9-10 months.  Apparently she now has another
hobby....


6/10/84.  I forgot to mention that, a couple of weeks ago, Julia
showed a version of the word "rock" (pronounced "accah") at Beverly's
house, for rocks and stones of various sizes (this is after a period
in which she referred to rocks and clumps of dirt as "baba", perhaps
meaning "ball").  In the last few days, however, rocks are now
referred to with that all-purpose sound "gahgah".  She does, however,
seem to be trying to split off a separate sound "behbee" for babies
and dolls.  Also, there is lots of new experimenting with "mahmee"--
often for me (even in calling me while going from room to room) but
also in other less obvious contexts.  Cindy says that Julia also
sometimes calls her "mommy" (not surprising, since that is what Cindy
is called all day by her own children), but also said quite distinctly
"Hi Cindy" this week.

There have been several other examples of "almost sentences", i.e.
single word utterances very close together but with separate
intonation contours.  These all involve permutations of very familiar
words like "hi, dadda" or "allgone, juice" or "baba, allgone".  Other
times she looks me straight in the eye, and with utmost seriousness,
says two or three completely incomprehensible syllables.  She now gets
quite frustrated when she is NOT understood (after her initial
wonderment that languages works at all), and will often grab George or
me by the shoulder, elbow, hip, whatever is handy and try to push us
up into action, out into the kitchen, toward the outside door, etc.,
while muttering the same strings of incomprehensible and utterly
sincere syllables.

This morning after George emerged from the shower scantily clothed, he
sat down on the living room floor and pretended to be a baby waiting
to be diapered.  After being told "Daddy needs a diaper", Julia went
quite deliberately through two rooms and into her own room, and
returned with a plastic bag (filled with one of her own dirty diapers,
filched from the diaperpail) and a tissue (which had been dropped on
the floor in her room).  She went over and wiped George's bottom with
the tissue, then while we were rolling with laughter returned to her
room and brought out a fresh clean diaper.

 Later on this afternoon we bought her a toy shopping cart of her own.
She has pushed it around for an hour or so since, loading it with
various objects from the floor, etc.  She pulled at the inner basket
as if she were trying to close it up like the ones in the supermarket
(this one doesn't close).  George started to play shopping with her,
complete with paying money, loading a filled shopping bag in the car,
and returning to the kitchen to put the groceries away.  Julia
solemnly took blocks and cylinders from the shopping bag and placed
them on shelves in the refrigerator.

J has also elaborated her FischerPrice play with a few new furniture
and vehicle items purchased today.  I modelled flying the toy airplane
around with a "vroom" sound.  Five minutes later she picked the plane
up and soared it about, then threw it quite deliberately for a
distance as if trying to make it fly.  She moved the other vehicles
around the floor with a vroom sound, but never in the air, so she has
apparently understood the point.  There was also much work at putting
people into their beds, into chairs, into their cars, and back again.

 We are leaving for Rome, Julia and I, on Wednesday, a terrifying
journey.  I will have to keep my notes by pencil there, but am anxious
to see how she will handle all the changes (including changes in the
language around her).




7/5/84.  We are back from our journey, with several pages of notes.
Overall, J's vocabulary has NOT expanded very much, and many of the
old words have still failed to reappear.  A few old reliables like
JUICE or CHEESE or SHOES have shown up once or twice.  However, the
operative vocabulary right now seems to consist of ALLGONE, GAGA,
BABA, DIS, HOT, HAT, HI.  WADOO (water) is marginally reliable.  But
there are some interesting events nonetheless.

 First, her "abbidabah" nonsense sound is very common, and its meaning
is now clear: it is used to anticipate or comment upon large body
movements by Julia herself (climbing up, getting down, being picked
up, moving up or down stairs, etc.).  I finally realized on this trip
that it comes from a sound I had been making unconciously when picking
her up (something like "hupdibbah").

 Another interesting development is in the now quite clear
proliferation of two-word utterances, despite her limited on-line
vocabulary.  ALLGONE BABA has been observed many times now, in a range
of circumstances (but all involving bottles).  ALLGONE GAGA occurred
several times during our one day stop at Jane's house, to comment upon
the many and varied disappearances of their many and varied cats.  DIS
BABA first appeared when J was looking at a little boy playing in the
courtyard below.  It was reported the next day in an odd circumstance:
the babysitter Francesca took J to her mother's house, and as J
watched F's mother trying on a dress before the mirror and examining
herself, J walked over to the mirror, held her own dress out, and said
"DIS BABA".  In imitation (immediate and deferred) J repeatedly
produced BIG GAGA after Francesca started a game of talking about
large and small dogs and asking J which she wanted.  Finally, on the
way back from Rome again at Jane's house, J threw baby John's juice
bottle in the wading pool and said "WADOO BABA".  These are quite
clearly multiword utterances, i.e.  encased within a single intonation
contour, although both words do receive heavy stress (e.g. "WAdoo
BAba").


 Some other language examples from Rome include the following.  The
sound "VVVV" and/or the back-and-forth gesture with her hand in the
air are now given quite reliably to the sight of airplanes, to the
word airplane, to toy airplanes, and/or to the sound of an airplane
overhead.  At the Rome zoo, J tried to imitate and extend the word
TIGER (pronounced TIYA) several times, but ended up calling almost all
of the caged animals "DOODOO", a sound that I had not previously
heard.  She learned the word BUA (meaning "owie", and pronounced BOO)
in Rome while pointing to insect bites on her legs.  After a day or
two, the production version disappeared while the receptive one (with
leg-pointing) remained.  While Ruth Miller stayed with us in Rome, J
seemed many times to try to say "Ruth", and certainly responded
appropriately to the name; similar efforts occurred with Virginia.
However, I did not note any names for Francesca.


Once her father was not around, the word DADA virtually disappeared,
except for a couple of occasions around men.  She did correctly
identify her father in a photograph, and addressed him immediately
upon returning yesterday.  But she did not address that name to me
anymore.  Instead, she seemed often to call me BABA--although it could
be that she habitually asked me for bottles immediately on seeing me.
I'm just not sure.  The sound MAMEE still seems to function as a
general request.  Interestingly, on one occasion when she pointed to
my nipple and said BABA, I pointed back and forth between her nipple
and mine.  The next day, she pointed to her own nipple and said BABA.

Generally, it is worth pointing out that Julia was quite upset by all
the changes and separations of this trip, showing anger toward me more
often and in greater degree than ever before, plus terrible separation
scenes when I had to leave her with Francesco in the morning for work.
Indeed she began to anticipate F's arrival, crying when the doorbell
range or when I started to get dressed, and trying to push F out the
door when she arrived. In general, she developed a strong resistance
to getting dressed, often throwing tantrums.  This included a peculiar
insistence upon wearing the same outfit that she wore on arrival in
Rome-- similar to her attachment at Grandma's in April to a jacket
that she had worn on arrival.  It is as though she believes the
original outfit will (like Dorothy's ruby slippers) return her back
home.  However, she was otherwise extremely social and pleasant with
everyone, making a fabulous hit with the Roman populace.  She showed
about fifteen minutes of cold avoidance upon seeing George at the
airport yesterday, but melted and ran around with joyous affection at
home the rest of the evening.  Today there have been a couple of
episodes of crankiness and upset (especially when I left to do some
errands), but she is readjusting to time, sleep and food remarkably
well.

J picked up several gestural routines in Italy, besides the above BUA
example.  She learned to give kisses (in the air, without pressing her
mouth to the kisse), to say SHHH with the appropriate finger to mouth
gesture, to twist both hands back and forth in the air to a song
called FARFALLINA, to put her finger in her cheek and twist it back
and forth in response to BUONO (the Italian word for "good").  George
notes that J made the buono gesture spontaneously today when eating
good things and when going into the sunshine.

I had also used the back- and-forth gesture with index finger in the
air together with saying NO (something Italians commonly do).  J now
does this spontaneously when commenting something wicked of her own,
together with a headshake.  At Jane's house she gave both the gesture
and headshake to baby John who was approaching the forbidden
television knobs.  She also began saying the word PEEKABOO (pronounced
PEEKABAH), first with me and then later in spontaneous hiding play
with John.

I had the impression in Italy that new nonsense strings were entering
her babbling repertoire, sounding a lot like Italian phrases such as
NON VOGLIO ("I don't want") plus a few others.  This is, however, hard
to document with any precision.

 George commented that, all day long today, Julia keeps saying the
word WHY, quite clearly, but with no obvious meaning.  Also, "B" words
are finally starting to differentiate again, back into BUH for bird,
BAH for balls, BEHBEE (for bears and babies), and some versions of
BABA that seem to stand halfway between P and B for apple and a couple
of other things.  Similarly, the GAGA group may be about to split up,
since the word for "car" is now GAH.

There were some very interesting developments in symbolic play this
trip.  Besides lots of feeding, diapering, bathing, etc. of dolls,
there were some new items.  After one exposure to our putting camphor
ointment on her legs from a small tube, J imitated the activity with
great precision for days every time she got her hand on the (closed)
tube.  This included a prolonged bout of applying "ointment" from her
own babybottle in the back seat of the car.  One evening while feeding
her I tried the old trick of treating the spoon as an airplane seeking
a mouth- hangar.  This didn't work at all.  However, a few moments
later when a plane passed overhead, J picked up a stringbean and moved
it back and forth in the air while saying "VVVV".  Then she decided
that the bean was a spoon, trying to pick up rice at the end and bring
it to her mouth.

On the plane from Rome, we had some extended play with crackers.
First she placed them in an intricate rectangular design, then grouped
them into piles.  I suggested "Is that a car?" and she began pushing a
cracker back and forth across the tray saying VVVV, and CAH.  I then
tried a Jerry Kagan test for relational concepts, putting a large and
a small cracker side by side and saying "Here's a mommy and a baby.
Where's the baby?"  She answered by pointing to the small cracker.
Then I asked "Where's the Mommy?" and she pointed to the larger
cracker.  I tried this again by breaking the larger cracker into a big
and a small piece, and got the same result.  On several such trials, J
made a couple of errors but performed well beyond chance levels.

 Comprehension still seems excellent, though not entirely reliable,
often for rather complex requests.  She also picked out rather
miniscule and abstract flowers and rocks from a picture book, upon
request.  When I talked to her various times about Daddy, Cindy and
other missing people, she became very interested and looked around
with a puzzled look.

The word "Allgone" is also often used with no obvious referents
visible, e.g. in the morning in the dark in her crib where she may be
referring to the absence of a bottle.  These are sporadic
observations; still, I have the clear sense that Julia now thinks and
talks about things that are not there.  At the Tivoli gardens (Villa
D'Este) we approached a large pond with no fish whatsoever.  Perhaps
remembering the goldfish in various ponds where her father has taken
her, Julia kept looking intently into the water and saying ALLGONE.

7/6/84.  While George was watching her yesterday, Julia spent a very
long period of time engaged in constructing a rectangular pattern out
of babywipes.  She took each square folded baby wipe and unfolded it
into its basic rectangular form.  Each wipe, once unfolded, was placed
in parallel (the long dimension running vertically) next to another
until she had four across.  Two more were thus placed, running
vertically from left to right, under the first four.  The last two
(making a total of eight) were placed a bit more diagonally,
destroying the symmetry somewhat, until J got tired of the game and
went elsewhere--leaving her near-perfect grid of wipes behind.

J is starting to give surprisingly correct yes or no answers (with
head movements) to a wide variety of questions: about needing a diaper
change, wanting various foods or liquids, going to bed or napping,
going outside, going to the car, visiting the park, looking for a
doggie, etc.  She also frequently goes to the room or the object that
she is told to go to (this may be more obvious to me now that we're
home, where--of course--Julia knows the house better).  This morning
she did not want to put her shoes on, insisting instead upon wearing
little slipper socks.  I asked her if she wanted to go outside, in the
car, to the park.  She nodded yes.  I explained patiently, pointing to
her sandals, that she had to wear outside shoes if she wanted to go to
the park.  She then reached for the sandals, and helped me put them
on.

 7/6/84.  Two interesting gestural combinations today, back to back.
While sitting in her highchair on the patio, Julia had been
"commenting" on the sound of passing airplanes by making her plane
sound-and-gesture.  She also seemed to try and approximate the word
"airplane" with something like "PAY".  Around the same time, I was
shooing flies away with a back-and-forth hand gesture, saying "Damned
flies".  A few moments later, J pointed directly at a fly on the patio
table, and without interruption moved her hand into the airplane
gesture plus "VVV".  Shortly after that, she pointed out into the
sunshine toward her little tub (where, the day before, she had
commented on the water and sunny day by making the "BUONO"
gesture--which she will now also make to the word "GOOD").  Again,
without a break, she pulled her finger to her cheek and made the BUONO
gesture, as though the remark upon the goodness of the sunshine and
the fun to be had out there.  This is the first and clearest instance
(or pair of instances) of a two-gesture combination in which each
gesture involves a different component of a compound meaning (as if to
say "that thing flies" or "that thing airplane" in the fly instance,
and "out there good" or "sunshine good" in the second case).

7/9/84.  Julia developed a little game yesterday with her father,
repeated again today, of switching rapidly back and forth between two
routines: FARFALLINA (while he or I sing the appropriate song while
she makes the two-handed butterfly gesture) and PATTYCAKE (again while
we sing the appropriate song).  The game was to switch quickly and
suddenly from one to the other and watch the befuddled grownup try to
switch songs fast enough.  She went back and forth this way for a very
long time (about 10 turns each).

 This ability to keep two routines on-line seems to accompany a spurt
in classification skills.  Yesterday at a friend's house she sorted
shapes and colors of blocks at length, with great patience.
Similarly, at dinner she likes to pull disparate types of food bits
apart, into appropriate piles, one type at a time.

It sounds as though J has begun to provide an empty schwa-sound in
front of nouns from time to time (e.g. "duh baba") as though
approximating the use of articles and other determiners.  There are
also more single-word sequences (in addition to the multiword
utterances discussed earlier) like BABA....DADA when her father went
out to make her a bottle.

7/14/84.  While playing on the patio yesterday, J picked a leaf and
held it up and the air and threw it, as if trying to make it fly.
Then she took it and moved it back and forth in the air in her
airplane gesture while saying VVVVVV.  Meanwhile, today her father
built her an airplane of bristleblocks, and she said the word APEE
(airplane) several times.  If this sticks, it will be the first
example in which a vocal routine (VVVV) and a word for the same object
coexist.


 While playing in the living room with books and toys last night,
Julia looked at a picture of babies with haloes over their heads and
said "hat". Then she picked up a yellow plastic ring, put it on top of
her own head and said "hat" again.

7/21/84.  I have been away for five days, leaving Julia and George at
home.  He reports several anecdotes in my absence.  First, she has
begun to extend the "SSHH" sound and gesture to sleeping and crying
babies (including a page of babies in a book).  Her attachment to her
big cloth doll became quite intense in my absence, and she has
insisted upon doing or being helped with diapering, dressing, putting
on shoes, etc.  Yesterday (after I returned) this included putting a
telephone receiver to her doll's ear, and putting her doll up to my
breast while I was lying down napping.  When we were at Seaport
Village walking around, Julia turned around and began pointing to her
stroller, quite upset, saying BABA.  I remembered that her doll had
been in the stroller at the airport for an hour while J and G had
waited for me, and thought she might have remembered her missing doll.
I said "Your baby is in the car, Julia, in the car.  We'll get the
baby later."  This seemed to satisfy her, and for a few minutes she
would occasionally say "GAH" to herself as if reminding herself of the
doll's whereabouts.

  This business of communicating about absent things took an
interesting turn today over lunch.  When her grapes were gone, Julia
called my attention with a pronounced whine and started pointing
repeatedly at the points on her tray where the grapes had been
sitting.  I asked "Do you want more grapes?", and she nodded smiling.

 After she had finished a glass of water yesterday (pouring most of it
over a picnic table), J called out insistently "DADA", and then when
she had his attention, said "Mowah"--which I presume means MORE,
another first.  He asked if she wanted more water, and she nodded.  I
took the glass and went off to get more.  J started to cry on seeing
me leave (I'd only been back for an hour, and this was the first time
I moved from her sight), but George explained to her that "Mommy is
going to get some more water."  This explanation seemed to be totally
satisfactory.

 On the way to Seaport Village she pointed out toward the harbor and
said "DIS

WADOO", something which sounded rather like an attempt at "THIS IS THE
WATER".  There are more and more cases like this in which she seems to
be providing a slot for articles or determiners before nouns.

The word BUA returned unprompted yesterday when Julia pointed to her
legs and said BOO.  George looked and answered "You don't have a bua
there."  She then pointed at another spot on her other thigh and said
BUA again.  Later on, while we were at Seaport Village standing near a
flowering bush with thorns, I warned Julia about the thorns, pointing
to them and saying BUA.  She repeated the word several times
thereafter, pointing at the thorns and/or looking at her finger (which
suggests that she may have lightly pricked herself while I wasn't
looking).

George reports a still more complex construction pattern this past
week, involving about 15 colored bristle blocks.  First J made a
pattern of 8 long blue blocks, each placed running vertically, four
across the top and four across the bottom.  Then, to the north of the
blue display, she started a similar grid pattern of about 7 square
yellow blocks until she got bored and quit.

 7/22.  Yesterday we bought Julia 100 colored wooden blocks of varying
shapes, to supply her new interest in classification and construction.
George did some building in front of her yesterday, but she tried
little herself.  This morning, however, after watching him build a
tower, she began to build one herself out of tall purple cylinders
less than an inch in diameter.  George did not help her, except to say
"careful" as she placed each one (which seemed to slow her down and
make her adjust the cylinder more carefully) and applauding every
addition.  Julia managed to create a tower of seven thin cylinders, a
feat that George himself had a hard time reproducing when trying to
show me later!

Accompanying this boom in spatial relations and construction, I've
noticed that Julia has gotten much better at detours.  A few weeks
ago, if a desired object lay, for example, on the floor on the other
side of a chair and table, she whined and reached futiley.  Now she
will try several alternate routes if one is blocked, including routes
that take her temporarily in the opposite direction of the goal.  It
is very tempting to infer that she is planning these routes internally
in a new way.


She also said TOWAH to me later, pointing toward the blocks, and
began, with George's prompting, to say "block" (still more like BLAH).
Later, when we went through a long doll- dressing sequence, she began
to say the word SHIRT after me (pronounced SYAH).  She also brought
her doll into the bathroom where I was, pointed to its shoe and said
BABA SYOO--another original sentence.  In this example, there was
unequal stress on the two words, with heavier stress on the word
"shoe".

At the zoo later today, she got into the game of locating and naming
hats (saying HA--she approximates the "t" final in HAT and HOT by an
abrupt cessation of the vowel) and patting the top of her head.  She
does this now to hats in books, and to hatted people at such a
distance that I often don't know what she is talking about for several
minutes.  (I think she must be far-sighted.)  When we saw the turtles
at the zoo, she began to name them (pronounced TOODOO), and also
pointed to a tiger on a book cover, saying TIYAH.  With all these new
or relatively new words in one day, Julia seems to be on a roll....

7/24.  The finger- to-mouth SSHH sound/gesture is applied very
generally now to sleeping or crying babies (in books, overheard in the
supermarket, etc.), and to any animal that appears to be very still or
sleeping.  We had several examples yesterday in the zoo.  Also, this
gesture is often run together with the word BABA or GAGA like another
ersatz sentence.  In fact, there seem to be many more instances now of
successive single word utterances like BABA...SHSH, GAGA...SHSH,
DADA...BABA (when daddy is getting her bottle).  All of this is nested
within some much more differentiated but still (to me) unintelligible
jargon with very deliberate eye contact, pointing, very pronounced
intonation contours (like strong-minded declarations or persistent
questions).

In the now frequent block-building episodes with George, J has begun
to use the phrase I DOO DAH (I do that), spoken like a multisyllabic
word.  It is used appropriately when she takes a block and takes her
turn at placing it.  The same phrase also comes up in some less clear
contexts that may also involve her planning to carry out some act
(e.g. reaching toward the kitchen counter toward the lid of the pasta
container, which she had taken on and off repeatedly the day before).
This phrase is quite unlike her other more nominal expressions.

 She is also now quite clearly commenting on absent referents.
Yesterday when I picked her up alone at Cindy's (for the first time in
a couple of weeks), Julia began asking repeatedly and persistently for
DADA, for two hours until he was home.  Every time the sound of a car
passed outside, for example, she would point toward the door and say
DADA, and she often went to the door without any obvious cuing.  While
she watched me empty the dryer, she picked up one of her father's
socks and said quite clearly DADA; similarly, she said his name while
looking at one of his block constructions on the living room floor (I
should note here that George has so far used Julia's hundred blocks to
construct several temples and pantheons, an aqueduct, an amphitheater,
and the Circus Maximus).  Other examples of conversing about the
outside world include long bouts about GAGA the day after we saw
several cats and dogs outside.  When her father was pretending to be a
lion and crawling toward her growling, she also said GAGA to him, a
"spirit of the game" pretend-naming.  She then went back and forth
saying DADA....GAGA....DADA....GAGA.

   7/27/84.  Julia's successive single word comments are getting
longer and longer.  At breakfast this morning she said "BABA (apropos
of what I do not know, she was pointing out the
window)....SSSSHHH.......ALLGONE."  Possibly she heard a baby crying
which I did not hear (this often happens--her hearing is obviously
better than mine), and then the crying stopped.

At home this evening, I had received some pictures of Julia and cousin
John in the mail, from our Chicago trip.  One was a picture of J&J
playing by the wading pool with Julia holding up John's baby bottle.
Julia pointed at her own babybottle and said BABA and without
hesitation pointed at the bottle in the picture and said BABA again,
in an absolutely deliberate comment on comparison.

A while ago, while playing blocks with George in the living room, she
responded to his question "Will you fix it?" by saying "I FISS IT".
The you/I alternation here is a bit spooky, if it is reliable.

Over dinner when I told her that her beans were still too hot to eat,
from some distance she made the gesture of blowing on the food.  I'm
not sure if she meant this as a comment or a request to me, but George
says he's seen a similar behavior several times.

 7/28/84.  Yesterday we were walking around the neighborhood, and had
just seen a small baby around the corner.  The day before, on a
similar walk, at the same spot, we had seen a cat.  On this second
occasion, Julia insisted on rounding the corner again to see the
Interesting Thing that had been there.  As we came around, she
produced the first evident self- correction that I have heard:
"GA...BABA"--as if she were starting to comment on the cat (which was
yesterday's find) and then remembered that today's goal was different.

 Her phrase I DO DAH is getting more and more common, as a comment and
as a request to be allowed to do something herself.  It is interesting
that, at the same time, the ubiquitous ABBIDABAH is waning.

She spontaneously produced "banana" (ANA) at the refrigerator today.
Also, when I gave her a small tiger from my jewelry box, she named it
over and over again, put it in George's Circus Maximus to run it
around, and carried it around quite a while.

In the tub yesterday I noticed that J got up on all fours and then
said GAGA, as if to say "I'm a doggy now".  George says that he's seen
that several times.

She has a new word that sounds something like TADOO.  It's use is not
entirely clear, but it seems to be when she is about to handle
something she suspects she shouldn't have or do something she isn't
supposed to do.  I remember that I very often take things away from
her that I don't want her to have and accompany that with "Thank you."
So this may be a version of THANKYOU, for a markedly different
purpose.


Today I tried the experiment of putting rouge on her nose, to see what
she would do upon looking in the mirror.  The literature suggests
that, around 18 months, infants touch their own noses as if they
really understand that the image in the mirror is themselves.  Well,
if so, Julia doesn't.  She merely stared in puzzlement.

 7/31/84.  We went to the zoo yesterday, and Julia displayed very
clear control of the word TOODOO (turtle).  I find it interesting that
this word and the above TADOO and the phrase I DO DAH are coming in at
the same time, as though once again phonological patterns are
controlling lexical acquisition.  Similarly, ICE is now clearly in her
repertoire, and EYES is being resurrected at the same time (however,
I've yet to see her old word NICE in this set).  CHEESE, SHOES and
JUICE are quite common again now--as though they have come in and out
as a set on phonological grounds as well.  (She also tries to say
SHIRT a lot, something like SHOI).


 Cindy tells me that she says THANKYOU when Julia pats Ben or is
otherwise nice to other babies.  So this supports my idea that her new
TADOO is a version of thank you.  This morning she was engaged in a
prolonged bout of affection, touching, hugging, etc.  with her
favorite babydoll, and at one point stroked the doll's head saying
TADOO BABA.

Her old one-handed allgone gesture is almost always made two-handed
now, quite symmetrically.  It may be that this gesture has been
"contaminated" by the Farfallina routine, which is a symmetrical
two-handed gesture of twisting the hands back and forth at the wrist.

Since Dan and his dog came and went this weekend, Julia keeps asking
about the absent GAGA, often pointing toward the backyard where the
dog was tied most of those two days.