60. Aural Language
He/she’s listening.
Aural language comprehension precedes vocalization. A word of caution: your child well understands language heard before he or she speaks. As you speak, your toddler listens. You cannot know how much your child understands. That said, parents are encouraged to err on the side of caution and:
speak as if your toddler understands,
converse respectfully,
minimize slang and profanity and,
use correct grammatical constructions.
Correct speech informs literacy and literacy informs correct speech.
All countries possess a wealth of centuries old literature. All countries publish scientific journals. All countries publish laws and terms and conditions of governance. Proposed legislation is published on electoral ballots. The news of the day is published in newspapers.
Conforming to the above recommendations best equips your toddler to excel and play an active part in the intelligent co-creation of modern communities.
Children are not taught grammar. And yet, english speaking children will say ‘big table’ and spanish speaking children will say ‘mesa grande.’ Note the reversed position of adjective before noun (english) and adjective after noun (spanish.) Our brilliant pattern recognition system discerns correct grammatical construction. This is a remarkable phenomenon.
The more comprehensive our vocabularies, the better able we are to express ourselves. Think metacategories and specificity as discussed in Post 40
The more complex our working language, the more complex our thinking. The more complex our thinking the better able we are to understand and constructively engage our complex world. It’s one thing to think and talk about apples and oranges. It’s quite another to think and talk about economic systems.
Psychoanalytic thinking, notably, presupposes comprehension of complexity.