While I never knew the term for this, my brother used to do this when he was younger. He would also just consistantly use words that we figured he just made up. For example, his word for "stuck" was "gutz" which I don't know how to spell but it rhymes with "foot" with a Z or an S at the end. He's 22 now, but my whole family still uses some of these words because they're so funny. It's not unusual to here me say, "can you get the lid off of this jar?It's gutz."
I'm intrigued now, maybe it's another language.
-Allison
I understand completely. I, too, had my own words for things - however, they did not carry on from a past life.
"Children learn to talk
By Sara Lind
How do children learn to talk? What is characteristic for the small people's language? These questions engage both linguistics, psychologists and parents all over the world.
It is easy to believe that the newborn baby is nothing more than a lump who eats, fills its diapers and sleeps. Many other animals seems more stable. For example, it will not take more than eight-twelve weeks before the kitten can live without its mother. For a human being, it takes several years. Why is it like that?
Scientists believe that we are born "too early" in relation to other animals. The reason for this is that the human mother's pelvis is too small (since we are going on two legs instead of four) to cope a child birth in a later phase. Therefore, it is biologically fixed that we are born when the baby body will survive outside its mother's womb.
But the little human baby isn't just a lump who eats, fills its diapers and sleeps. It has even started to be talked about "the intelligent infant". It won't take long after birth before the baby can apprehend colors, discern smells, hear differences between for example different voices, coordinate different sensations and imitate.
From the very first breath, the baby starts to communicate with its surrounding. The newborn seeks eye contact with its mother. This facilitates from the fixed adjustment of eye sharpness in 20 centimeters that the baby has - exactly the right distance to studying its mother's face when being breastfeeded.
The scream of the baby is also a form of communication. Parents interpret and do what the baby wants to be done. Many parents learn the different screams of their child for different things. Is the baby hungry, it will use one sort of scream. Is it longing for warmth and body contact, it'll use another scream. Is the diaper wet or smeary, there is a third scream. If it is hurt, there is a fourth and so on.
But how conscious is the babies of their communications with the surroundings?
Inquiries have been done where the baby was placed in one room and its mother in another. They were allowed to communicate through intern-tv. The baby could not for a start understand the situation, but after awhile it started to communicate with its mother on the tv-monitor. A little later, the direct communication was interrupted and instead the baby had to watch a recorded part of the mother when she talked to the baby. The baby noticed it immediately. It became worried and more and more in despair. Its mother was impossible to influence. She just talked on. The same thing was done with the mother. She was placed to talk to the baby directly, she thought. The truth was that it was a recorded part with her baby.She did everything to call for the baby's attention, but something was wrong. She became worried as well.
This means that the baby notices the differences between one-way-communications and two-way-communications.
When the baby gets one or two months old, it'll start to babble. The babble is containing, at first, a beginning of separate sounds, that will be connected to sound chain of consonants and vowels, the classical baby sounds for example: da-da, ba-ba.
For the baby, the babbling is a way to talk to the surrounding. The parents will get response from the babbling.
Gradually, the first word will appear. Mostly, it is "mum" that is the very first word. Then "dad".
Little by little, the baby builts its vocabulary, but it is still very economical with the words. "Dad", for example, means every man, not just its father. The same thing happens with "mum", it stands for every woman. This phenomenon is called over-extension.
Creating new words, that is another thing that children often do. And why not? If you don't know the correct word, you have to communicate in some way anyway.
Either, it's not easy for the child to know that a word that he or she knows about suddenly means anything else. However, the child could give a word a meaning of its own. The word "mum" could mean "I want to go to mummy" or "This is my mummy" or "Get mummy" or maybe "Where is mummy?".
Anytime between the age of one and two years, the child is doing a really big jump in its linguistic development. Now, she is started to connect words to sentences, even if they're short at first: "Mummy sleep" may mean that the mother should place herself in the baby's bed and sleep there - together with the child. "Spade dig" is not a summon that the spade should start dig itself, it is an exhortation for you that the child wants to dig with the spade itself. Gradually, the sentences get longer. The grammar doesn't take long time to establish when the child starts to talk in sentences. It doesn't take long before the child learns that it is not only "sleep", it is "sleeps", "sleeping" and "slept" as well.
In the age of four or five, the baby have a mastery of a really complicated rule system. With this rule system in the luggage, it could produce flawless sentences.
But the linguistic development is not finished. It is one thing to be able to talk. It's another thing to know when you are supposed to talk and when you are supposed to stay out of it. You have to know the pattern of communication for special situations, for example how to convince, how to ask, how to tease, how to bark, how to tell stories in an exciting way, how to boast and so on. "
