On a Friday in late April, in a small house in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh, Saoirse Macleod-Eaton said the word moon for the first time. She was eighteen months and two days old. The moon, when she said it, was rising over the chimney pots across the road.
By the following Wednesday, she had said moon eighty-three times, by her father's count, and had added eleven other words to her active vocabulary. The eleven were, in order of acquisition: dog, more, no, up, ball, juice, dada, mama, bath, book, and, unsettlingly, oh-dear.
The phenomenon is sometimes called, in the developmental literature, the vocabulary spurt. It typically occurs between sixteen and twenty months. The child, who has been accumulating a slow handful of words over the preceding months, suddenly begins to add several a day.
The spurt is not universal. Some children do not show a clear spurt at all and instead acquire vocabulary on a more gradual incline. Others have what researchers call a referential style, learning many nouns quickly, and others a more expressive style, learning social phrases and gestures first.
Saoirse, the daughter of two academics, has so far been resoundingly referential. She names things. She names the moon. She names, on a recent walk along the Water of Leith, twelve different dogs in succession, all of them by the same word, with rising delight.
Her father, Callum Macleod, is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, which has had the consequence one might expect: he has been keeping a notebook. The notebook is a small black Moleskine and lives on top of the fridge.
He records each new word with the date, the context, and what linguists call the referent, which is the thing the word seems to mean. Moon entered the notebook on 24 April at 7:42 p.m. The referent was, indisputably, the moon.
He has tried, with mixed success, to avoid letting the notebook turn the household into a laboratory. His partner, Iona Eaton, is a children's-book editor and has told him, kindly but more than once, to put the notebook down at dinner.
The spurt began, in their household, the week after Saoirse turned eighteen months. There had been, before that, about a dozen reliable words. Dog, said any time a dog appeared, and quite often when one did not. Up, said any time she wished to be carried. No, learned, as is traditional, somewhat early.
The new words have arrived in clusters. Three on a Saturday. None on Sunday. Four on a Monday morning, all before breakfast. By the second week of May, the notebook had crossed forty words.
What the literature does not quite prepare you for, Callum has said, is the strangeness of it from the inside. A child you have known for eighteen months as a creature of pointing and small wordless demand becomes, in a fortnight, a creature with opinions.
Saoirse has opinions. She has, this week, demanded juice four times when she meant milk, and milk twice when she meant juice. She has, on being offered a banana, said no with such finality that her father returned the banana to the bowl. She had wanted, it turned out, an apple.
There is a particular small sentence-shape that arrives around this age, called the holophrase. It is a single word doing the work of a whole utterance. Up does not mean up. It means: I would like to be picked up now, please, and the reason is the cat is bothering me.
The listener does most of the grammar. The listener, in this household, is usually Iona, who has, after eighteen months, become genuinely fluent in a language with a vocabulary of forty words and almost no rules.
She can tell, by the cadence of more, whether Saoirse wants more pasta, more song, or more of the small wooden block tower they have just knocked down for the seventh time.
She can tell, by the angle at which book is held out, whether the book is to be read or to be put on the shelf because Saoirse has, with new authority, decided to clean up.
The cleaning up does not happen.
What is happening, in the brain, is a matter of some debate. The most-cited account is that around eighteen months, children come to understand that things have names, that names are arbitrary, and that you can learn one by simply asking. The realization is sometimes called the naming insight.
Whether or not the insight is a discrete event in the child's mind, the parent can see the change from outside. Saoirse, in early April, pointed at things and waited. Saoirse, in late April, points at things and looks at her parents with the small impatient face of a person waiting to be told a word.
The word, when supplied, is usually attempted within the hour and reliably possessed by the next day. Lamp, supplied on a Sunday evening, was hers by Tuesday morning. Spoon, supplied at lunch, was hers by tea.
Not every word sticks. Hedgehog, attempted by her parents twice during a walk on Calton Hill, has so far not appeared in the notebook. Squirrel has come out as guh, which is, to be fair, a reasonable summary.
There is an asymmetry the books warn about: receptive vocabulary outpaces productive vocabulary by a substantial margin. Saoirse understands, by Callum's careful estimate, somewhere between two hundred and three hundred words. She produces, this week, around fifty.
This is why a child who can say almost nothing can still follow the instruction to bring the book to her father and put it on the chair. She has understood every word. She is choosing, with her own small economy, what to say back.
By the end of May, Callum suspects, the notebook will cross a hundred words. By July, two hundred. By her second birthday, she will be putting two words together: more juice, dada up, no bath.
He has stopped, he has promised Iona, recording at dinner. The notebook stays on top of the fridge. The words happen. The moon, when it rises, is greeted with the same pleasure it was greeted with on the first night, and now Saoirse points and says its name. The spurt continues. The notebook fills. The household, the noisier one of two weeks ago, has not yet quite adjusted.
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