  I'm so proud of my baby girl! This morning she said "anana" when John handed her a banana. It's her first three-syllable word! Incidentally, banana was Aidan's as well, only it took him months to discover the first syllable "ba. " He said "nana" instead. Eleanor did the same with bagel since she was five months old. She'd say "BA! " for bagel, I don't think she's said that one right yet. Her first clear two-syllable word was Aidan (after the necessary mama and dada). Isn't it silly to count the syllables she's capable of saying? It's the only way I have left to measure her verbal accomplishments, though!
Between Aidan and Ellie's first year I read Elise Eliot's What's Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life , and my approach to language therefore was vastly different for the two of them. Poor Aidan, he's always the guinea pig! Eliot's chapter on verbal development is a pleasure to read because it's so amazingly informative and full of easily applicable advice. She explains that as soon as birth your child is trying to communicate with you. We parents are admonished by family or friends attempting wit to not think every noise and gesture is a big accomplishment, but for infants, it truly is. Eliot says their tiny brains are like little scientists conducting experiment after experiment. They do something, and if it works, they do it again and again. They smile and if you give them a smile back, they'll smile more. Therefore, mirroring your infants every attempt at communication from each little babble to every flailing gesture is fantastic for their development.
In doing this with Ellie I found, as Eliot said I would, a clear early pattern to her babbles. By the time she was four months old I was able to discern her babbles for Aidan from toy and from "nanas," or want to nurse. I don't think this necessarily accelerated her verbal development in annunciation terms, but it clearly gave her a sense of confidence in communicating and that positive reaction to the brain's little experiments should encourage her to love learning new developments in many other ways.
This is where the real excitement begins. Language really takes off between 12 and 18 months, when Ellie will strive to get to that magic 50 mark. For whatever reason, that's the average number of words a child knows when he or she hits an amazing explosion. Again, Elise Eliot: "Most toddlers' vocabulary explodes once they can say about four dozen words. Now they start adding one, two, or three new words every day, and their receptive vocabulary--the number of words a child understands--grows even more quickly. Between two and six, children are estimated to learn the meaning of a staggering eight words a day. That comes out to more than one new word every two hours they're awake, and they continue at this rate into elementary school years. By the time a child is six, it's been estimated that he understands some 13,000 words, although he doesn't speak nearly that many.
" So here's Ellie's vocabulary as best as I can interpret so far: mama, dada, aidan, bagel, cat, papa, nana/baba (grandma), car, look, nanas (which means nurse), uh-oh, bye-bye, hi, more, *and today's exciting addition! * banana 
