Baby question

[Beth]

My oldest daughter was an early talker, and there's a long, obnoxious
list of words I recorded in her baby book. My second daughter did not
talk early, and I remember worrying about her hearing, too, even
though the test by the pediatrician and later a preschool screener
proved that her hearing was fine. Around this same time, I started
learning information to present in Discovery Toys demonstrations (Not
an ad, as I'm no longer selling!) that included learning styles and
language development. I finally concluded that she was more of a
visual learner than an auditory one. It was a great help, especially
when I knew that I had to be sure she was looking at my face to "get"
what I was saying. 

The other thing I used to "teach" was on language development. I
explained it sort of like this (It's been a looong time, so I hope
this makes sense!): Children have different vocabularies: listening,
speaking, reading (and writing). Before your child can say a great
number of words, you could probably say to him or her, "Where's the
ball?" and s/he would look towards and/or go get it. Children's
listening vocabularies develop first. The more you speak to them,
chatting, describing, reading (even if it's your favorite book) the
more this vocabulary grows. After they've been speaking for some time,
they could probably understand a T.V. script and tell you *all* about
it, but if you handed it to them, they couldn't read it. In fact,
their reading vocabulary usually doesn't catch up to their listening
and speaking vocabularies until they're in about junior high. Of
course, the more you read to them, the larger their listening (and
speaking) vocabularies will grow and this will eventually have a
positive effect on their reading vocabulary. In fact, one suggestion I
read was to read aloud to your children as long as they'd let you and
even provided "sneaky" ways to read aloud to your teenager, like
reading interesting newspaper articles to engage them in thoughtful
discussion. Of course I do this *all the time* with my teenage
daugher. [Sigh] Maybe that's why I no longer sell ;-)

Beth, whose girls all learned what i-c-e c-r-e-a-m spelled way before
they could read, darn it