Sam Cooke, Barney The Dinosaur, and The Acquisition Of Language As An Extended Developmental Psych Project

When my daughter was first born I couldn't wait to have a conversation with her. Well, let's back up for a moment: during the entire nine and a half months that my daughter was awaiting birth I couldn't wait to have a conversation with her. After she was born, therefore, I wasted no time in attempting to speed up her acquisition of language and development of vocabulary.

I would sing to her all the time, our favorites being the collected works of Sam Cooke. She really liked the low bass voice that opened up "Chain Gang", the "Well don't you know..." part that I'd sing in a exaggerated deep, booming voice. She also liked "Cupid", especially the "thwwwwirp" sound/onomatopoeia that mimicked the sound of the arrow (" ...and let you arrow fly.... thwwwwrip ... straight to my lover's heart..."). But the best and most favorite of all was "Only Sixteen", which I sang whenever she reached a "6 milestone", as in:

"She was only Six hours, only Six hours, I loved her so..."

...which was the first. But of course, I sang the song at 6 days, six weeks, and six months as well (which was the last time). Those of you who find this hard to believe and/or a bit Temporally OCD on my part are referred to a previous missive I wrote on my abnormal obsession with time and numbers, here.

I had to do a lot of singing to Adri, because she was what was called "colicy" back then (still used?), or in other words, she cried a lot at night when left alone in her crib to sleep. I'd sing Sam Cooke and rock her in different exaggerated ways in order to calm her. It usually worked.

I also, of course, figured that the more she was exposed to language the quicker she'd start talking. So I'd sing and do a lot of pointing to objects and naming them, mostly her body parts ("this is your foot. These are your toes", etc). This is no different than any parent does, of course, but I was doing it specifically to speed up the day when she and I could have a conversation.

She picked up language quickly, as most young humans do, and when she was still pretty young I could ask her where her nose was, for example, and she'd point to it. I kept a running tab of how many words she understood in this manner. It was easy to do so at first, but the number grows in a logarithmic manner, with a steep upwards curve. At first she knew, say, 10 words, then 50, then 200, all in quick order. I actually kept track until it was well over 500 (when I couldn't sleep, which was often when I was younger, I'd sit in bed and think of things. Back then, I'd go over all the words Adri knew, counting them instead of sheep until I fell asleep).

In what seemed like an eternity then, and a blink of an eye now, she gradually began to be able to hold a conversation with me. Sure, it was mainly about Barney the Dinosaur at first, but then progressed to explaining to me why Barbie needed a Barbie Car of her own, to what she was learning in school, to what friend said what about who, to the point that I sometimes wondered why I had taught her to talk in the first place; she was very verbal, and she felt comfortable telling me anything. ;-) At the risk of embarrassing her if she's reading this, the pinnacle of my "I can't wait until we can talk to each other" project occurred the day she called me all excited to tell me that she'd had her first period, going into detail about how, when, and why. Part of me wished she'd simply sang "Wonderful World" to me instead.

But only a part of me.