Child Language Quotes

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

I've got a little baby, I made him...He doesn't speak, he's 2...He's a slow learner, he's only got 2 words...car and map...I'm slightly worried he's trying to escape. If his next word is passport we are in serious trouble!

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

My sister called her pillow a pilgo. My brother called his pacifier his nimma. But I don't think I was much of a word generator myself.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

Ma-ma does everything for the baby, who responds by saying Da-da first.

I abhor 'baby talk.' I speak to kids like I would any other person, and they seem to respond to it.

We may come to Jesus and ask Him; He will know all about it; if He comes to a little child, he will adapt himself to the language and capacity of a little child.

The question is the primary form of communication for little kids.

A lot of people think that kids say the darnedest things. But so would you if you had no education. You'd just be like, I am bike cheese. Because you wouldn't know what words were.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Reading to babies creates such a special parent-child bond and so strongly influences a child's language skills that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that doctors and nurses routinely discuss it with parents during pediatric visits.