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dools

We taught both our kids to sign.

My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet.

I asked her if she would like to hear some music.

She made the sign for dog.

I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head.

She made the sign for tree.

I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm...

I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was a christmas tree.

She pointed to that excitedly!

I was like "dog christmas tree music" ... it took me a second to realise that she wanted to listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack that I had had playing off YouTube at Christmas 3 months previously!

I put that on again and we danced around to it.

I thought that was totally wild! It was the first time I remember her communicating a really sophisticated preference other than just wanting to eat/drink/help etc.

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What's most surprising to me there is that she actually recognized Snoopy as a dog. He's a pretty abstracted drawing, walking on two feet and pointing with human hands. There's something interesting to be said about perceptual development there. I believe that Daniel Everett said that even the adult Piraha couldn't understand abstracted 2D drawings at all.

If we were indoctrinated into the tradition of keeping capybaras as pets then she probably would have assumed snoopy was a capy. As it stands - he’s not a cat, he’s not a bird, so he must be a dog.

I'm pretty sure my two-year-old still thought we could have giraffes and aligators as pets at that age XD

The reverse surprised me too: From seeing only abstract drawings of dogs, my daughter pointed at a real dog for the first time and said “dog!”

ML is pretty long way from being able to make generalizations like that from…20 samples?

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

And then the genocide started

Unfortunately, the settlers never really got what the native Americans were trying to say.

Which group is the toddler here?

One group had an advanced democratic government of the people which the other group struggled to learn from: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/democracy-indigenous-ame...

The settlers were greeted by English speaking native Americans who had been working the shipping trade.

The crazy thing about this happening with toddlers (at least in my experience) is that you're not really sure how complex their desires are until they manage to communicate them.

Settlers interacting with natives knew full well how complex their desires were – they lived side-by-side, traded, socialised, and learned from each other.[1] Any suggestion of a primitive native is self-comforting propaganda from the industrial complex that comes after the settlers.

[1]: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; Usner; Omohundro Institute; 2014.

What an absolutely ridiculous statement. Go to reddit with that.

When signing dog, was she referring to reindeers?

Charlie Brown -> Snoopy, would be my guess.

The album cover for the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack has Snoopy sitting on top of a Christmas tree. I was playing the album from YouTube through the stereo and the album cover was showing on the TV to which the computer was connected.

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