Ice Cream v. Eiskrem

Many a doting parent writes down for safekeeping his child's first baby words. But Dr. Werner F. Leopold, a professor at Northwestern University, outdid most parents. He made a daily record of his child's words for seven years. Last week he published part of this record as scientific research.*

Dr. Leopold is a professor of German and a linguistics expert. When his first daughter, Hildegard, was born nine years ago, Professor Leopold immediately started a serious study of her language development. He kept a diary, put down every sound his baby uttered. (Eventually, Hildegard, seeing her father constantly busy with a pencil, asked: "What are you writing?" He replied: "I am taking notes for my work," kept his secret.) Dr. Leopold gave his experiment an unusual twist by teaching Hildegard two languages: from birth he talked to her only in German, his wife only in English.

Dr. Leopold believes that his findings are highly significant, that they upset some old notions. Volume I of his study, published last week, covers Hildegard's development to the age of two. Highlights:

> At two months Hildegard cooed.

> Her first syllables were not mamma, as traditionalists would have predicted, but baba.

> At six months she understood her name.

> At nine months she spoke her first deliberate word: bild (German for picture). Second word (ten months): pretty.

> Contrary to expectations, Hildegard knew papa (twelve months) before mamma (14 months)--possibly because papa was always around taking notes.

> There was a high mortality among her early words: although she spoke 377 words all told during her first two years, at age two she had reduced this to a working vocabulary of 241.

> Even after learning dog she insisted on using the more euphonious wau-wau.

> Her vocabulary had strange, unexplained gaps: at two she still lacked such common and useful words as chair, tongue, yard, street.

> At two she used German and English words in the same sentence, had not yet separated them into two systems. Unexplained were her choices between German and English words for the same thing: she preferred ice cream to Eiskrem, bathe to baden, flower to Blumen, cake to Kuchen. But she said bitte instead of please, Bett instead of bed, da instead of there, mehr instead of more.

> Hildegard's development confirmed a well-known phenomenon: that yes is one of the most ostracized words in English. At first Hildegard used ja, later all right.

* SPEECH DEVELOPMENT OF A BILINGUAL CHILD--Northwestern University ($2.25).

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