Kevin Baldeosingh
?My son Kyle is not a normal boy. This week he took up a teddy bear and hugged it, then brought it to me and ordered, "Hug."
This, mind you, from a boy who gives teddy bears more hugs than he does his Daddy. Ironically, those teddy bears aren't his � they are his sister's, who has pretty much ignored them for all of her three years. Jinaki has always preferred to play with pens, spoons, blocks and even cars than teddy bears and dolls. At the same time, she's lately been insisting on only wearing tops with sleeves, and her mother Afi thinks it's because Princess Sofia, which is her second favourite show after Doc McStuffins, wears outfits with sleeves.
Kyle, who is 14 months old, is more affectionate than Jinaki was at that age, although she contracted Daddyitis early enough so I was the one putting her to sleep even before she could talk. Her brother has Daddyitis only for playing, though. And, even though he hugs teddy bears, he also has the typical boys' obsession with cars. Not only was "car" his first noun, but "spinning" was one of his first verbs (from flicking the car wheels).
The main way in which Kyle is not normal, though, is that his verbal development is proceeding faster than his sister's did. Jinaki said her first word at 13 months; Kyle did so at 11. Now, he is already on to two- and three-word phrases, a stage Jinaki didn't attain until 17 months. This is not the normal pattern, because girls on average develop somewhat ahead of boys on most measures, especially verbal. What is interesting is that Kyle's ability to speak phrases at 14 months also means his vocabulary is bigger than Jinaki's was at the same age.
Child development researchers have long observed that children don't speak two-word sentences until they have acquired a minimum number of words. But is this because babies have to reach a certain cognitive stage before they can acquire the required number of words, or is it because a certain size vocabulary is needed before a baby can start making sentences?
Researchers at Harvard University in the United States tested these two hypotheses by tracking 27 adopted children from China, who came to the US not knowing English. "The adoptees and native children started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same size, further suggesting that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is but the number of words you know," wrote Joshua Hartshorne in a 2009 issue of Scientific American.
The puzzle for me is why Kyle should be acquiring his vocabulary at a faster rate than his sister's, especially since Jinaki's vocabulary at three years is pretty good. "Walter was driving fast and angrily," she told me the other day, recounting the Season One finale of Scorpion, a drama series about a group of high-IQ crime-fighters. After all, Jinaki as the first-born child had people talking more to her as an infant than Kyle does now. But maybe he's paying more attention to his sister's chatter than to the adults.