Sarah is at the point where we’re expecting hear the transition from babbling sounds to words. Recent experiences have reminded us of something we learned when we welcomed Sarah into our lives in Korea.
In Korea, we were told that Sarah’s foster family played peek-a-boo in Korean and they told us the Korean version of the phrase. In the earliest days (weeks?) while making the transition home with Sarah, we (mainly Joleen) used the Korean word/phrase occasionally. Since then, we’ve used the English phrase, “peek-a-boo.”
However, in the last week or so, I was with Sarah and she was playing peek-a-boo with me, but she said what sounded like the Korean phrase. On another occasion, Joleen also heard her use the phrase.
Amazing!
It’s funny. During our two adoption journeys, a number of people have asked us what language the kids speak. Well, because they were so young when we brought each of them home (around 8 months), they really didn’t speak any language (although, Korean was the language they were used to hearing, at the time).
But we have always wondered what impact the language/culture transition during infancy has on a child’s language development (does it delay because they have to learn all new sounds and words?).
Ethan has very strong language development (which continues to develop, daily, of course; I wrote a little recently about Ethan’s language development and plan a follow-up post in the near future), and we’re looking forward to watching/hearing how Sarah’s language develops!