Little kids make such cute mistakes when they talk.
We know they’re still learning the language, so we tolerate their errors and chuckle at how funny they sound.
Behind that chuckle is the assumption that the kids are getting it wrong because they just don’t know the rules yet.
In fact, kids’ mistakes show they know a lot more about the rules than we think.
The mistakes are evidence of very smart hypotheses the kids are forming from the limited data they’ve been given so far.
"Dop it!” instead of “stop it!”
It’s not easy to start a word with a consonant cluster. Kids don’t have the fine motor control they need to produce the ‘st’ in stop, but they don’t just leave it out. They substitute a sound they can produce. ‘D’ is a very smart substitution for ‘st’ in “stop.”
If you take a careful look at the acoustics of ‘t’ in adult versions of “stop” vs. “top,” you see that the ‘t’s in those words look different from each other.
The vocal chords kick in sooner for the ‘t’ in “stop.” A ‘d’ is basically a ‘t’ where the vocal chords kick in sooner, so when children substitute that sound, they show they’ve heard the difference between “stop” and “top” and hypothesized that it’s important for the language. And they are right!
Calls the dog “baby.”
When children start using words, they haven’t figured out all the situations in which they apply. They form hypotheses about word meaning and apply them on their own. The child might call all the kids and pets in the family “baby,” but not the parents, revealing a hypothesis that “baby” means “family member who other people have to get food for.”
She may call everyone she meets “baby,” extending the hypothesis to “living creatures.” Like any good scientist, she can only confirm her hypothesis by testing it. Eventually, she will get enough data to settle on the right one.
Points to something and says “thank you” when he wants it.
This mistake shows complex knowledge of pragmatics, or the meaning of words in contexts. He knows that “thank you” is not the name of a thing in the world, but is rather something we say in a specific context. “Thank you” occurs in the context of a transfer of possession. He’s saying, “Let’s do that thing where ‘thank you’ gets said.” Very clever way to try to bring about a transfer of possession!
See the rest of the story at Business Insider