Lost in Translation

The linguist in me has started to come out since Aiden has started to acquire language. I'm noticing patterns in his speech and trying to make sense of what's going on in his head. 

An example in phonetics: every word that Aiden knows that ends in the "r" sound, he will add an "n" to the end, so that "tractor" becomes "tractorn" and "four" becomes "fourn" and so forth. When we try to get him to say new words, he always gets the number of syllables correct even though the sounds are jumbled. If we ask him to say "omnivore" (one of my favorites of late...not sure why), he'll say "ovinone" (notice that it ends in an "n"), and if we ask him to say "cornucopia", he might say something like "copunocia". 

An example of syntax: he has started adding what I call "filler words" before and after the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) that he knows in what I believe to be an effort to form sentences. But since he doesn't know any structure words yet (articles, pronouns, prepositions-well, he does know a few prepositions), he just babbles those words when he's forming a sentence, so that a statement like "Gramps has a chimes clock at his house" (he's become quite obsessed with this clock) sounds like "Gramps nana-ah-na chimes clock ah-na-ah-na house".

Today, we were on the driveway playing with sidewalk chalk, and he was trying to figure out what to do with this little plastic chalk holder that his Mammy and Papa had given him for Christmas. So I said, "Give Mommy a big stick and I'll put it in there." (There were sticks of chalk lying all around him.) About 5 seconds later I find him dragging a big stick out of the yard and trying to stuff it into the chalk holder. It took me a second to figure out what was going on. Then I realized I hadn't specified that I wanted a stick of chalk as opposed to some other sort of stick. Ah, the joys of learning a language...