OK, it's 4.75 years too late for a baby blog, but better late than never.
The title, Oyo Komos, is a sentence in Avish, Abi's favorite language. (She consistently claims to be trilingual.) Actually, it's pretty much the only Avish sentence; other words come and go, but Oyo Komos has been there for about a year now. It means "How are you?" If you're doing well, you answer "Oyo!". If you're doing badly, you say "Komos". If you're doing so-so, you say "Komos Oyo". And if you're doing very badly, you don't say anything at all, so the person you're talking to doesn't get upset.
Abi was visiting MIT today, to be a live demo (a real child!) in the class of Josh's colleague Laura on cognitive development. But first, Abi stopped by Josh's office to draw a few pictures on his white board. She wrote "Abi" and "Papa" in a strange font that she claimed was Avish. Many hours later, she recreated exactly the same characters on a restaurant napkin. So it may be that Avish is on its way to becoming a written language.
Last week, Abi found out that Josh has almost certainly gotten tenure at MIT. She understands that tenure is something you get for doing good work as a scientist and discovering interesting new things, and that it means Josh can stay at MIT as long as he wants. But when she walked into his office today, she looked around excitedly and asked: "Papa, where's your tenure?"
In Laura's class, as befits a 4-year-old, Abi passed all the usual false belief tasks -- except for one. She was shown a pen box and asked what she thought was in it; she said pens. Then she got to see that the box actually had rubber bands in it, and was suitably surprised. When asked, "What did you think was in the box before you opened it?", she answered correctly (unlike last year). Finally, she was asked, "If your Mama were to come into the room right now, what would she think was in the box?" Abi thought about it and said, "I think my Mama would know that it was rubber bands." Clearly what we have here is a sophisticated theory of mind, which happens to hold that Mama knows everything.
1 comment:
Email from Laura:
The "Daddy, where's your tenure?" reminds of our family story from when Mari was 3 ... Sue read her a book about childbirth just before Henry was born -- and the book, in a masterstroke of understatement, said "So then your Mommy goes to the hospital. At the hospital, your Mommy will have a painful
twinge. Soon after, your baby brother or sister will be born." When Sue was in early labor, Martha came to the hospital and saw the IV needle in her arm and said "Mommy, is that your painful twinge?"
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