One of my hearing friends offered to make a voicemail message on my phone that will said something like “hi this is Frankie’s phone he’s Deaf so what are you even doing right now"
in my visual diary i’m supposed to go over my process and why i made the choices i did but a lot of the time i put stuff in bc it feels like something should go there
Okay, but imagine a medieval adventure fantasy where asexuals sell their services to parties who have to travel past sirens/incubi/succubi in order to fulfill their quests.
Imagine young witches and warlocks going through a final wizardry test where they have to square off against every magical creature they’ve ever learned about, and everyone is really confused as to how that one team just strolled past the sirens/incubi/succubi, and also as to why afterwards they high-fived, said “Aced it!” and then laughed for ten minutes straight.
Imagine a villain dousing a hero with a love potion and then unshackling her, expecting mindless devotion, only to have her then stab him and say “I’m aromantic, actually.”
Imagine an incubus carefully choosing a target and ending up on her couch with a tub of ice cream as she assures him that he is really good at his job and he can’t help it that he happened to pick an ace target.
Imagine an ace sailor who has to tie up his companions in the hold and sail the ship by himself whenever they encounter mermaids, and since it’s just him it’s really slow going, and he spends the entire time griping about allosexuals to the mermaids, who in turn gripe about how sick they are of having to target sailors before the sailors target them.
Imagine a love god trying to set up a pair of aro ace soulmates and putting them in increasingly romantic and/or risque situations, only to pull his hair out in frustration as they ignore or fix every situation and just become better and better friends.
When babies babble in baby talk they’re trying to repeat what they hear in an attempt to learn how to communicate better with their own species so if you want your baby to talk sooner speak in full regular [insert language here] not babbles and coos. Dogs, on the other hand, will never understand English so babble to them all you want they will love it and wiggle around when you do
Linguist here!
Turns out baby talk / “parentese” is actually substantially helpful in first language acquisition, not just in oral language, but in signed languages.
Parentese involves using a sing-song tone, excessive syllable repetition, and exaggerated distinction between each individual word, and the consonants and vowels within those words… all factors which help an infant develop the precursors to speech.
Have you ever listened to speakers of a foreign language, talking at their normal rate of speech? Notice how you can’t really even tell where the words begin and end, since they all string together so densely? That’s what a toddler is dealing with, all the time, except when exposed to parentese. Parentese substantially improves the speed of language acquisition, compared to exclusively talking at an ordinary rate of speech, in one’s usual pitches and tones.
There is some benefit in restricting your parentese to common English words, and avoiding words that are 100% nonsense vocabulary, like “ickle” instead of “little,” or “num-num,” etc., but this benefit largely won’t occur until the kid has already separated out consonants from vowels, and figured out how to discern syllable breaks and word breaks… and the benefit in this instance is ONLY in their receptive vocabulary – specifically, their ability to absorb more words being said to or near them – and it doesn’t assist their productive vocabulary. Using nonsense words DOES help the productive vocabulary and the development of grammar, because they involve sounds that the child can easily reproduce after hearing them (and which might have actually been said by the child first, in an attempt to pronounce a harder word), making it more likely that the child will confidently use these simplified words in early efforts to string sentences together.
Psycholinguists and language acquisition experts generally advise to just baby talk in the way that feels most natural to you, with the munchkins in your life. Un-forced parentese scales naturally with the child’s own proficiency at communicating, so by the time you start including more elaborate vocabulary, the kid has probably already learned enough that they’ll understand the words you’re introducing, and will be able to replicate the same sounds. Parentese is universal to every culture and every living language; this is largely because it works.
TL;DR – Baby talk actually helps language acquisition substantially.
the ireland referendum is marriage “regardless of sex” which means it’s fully gender-inclusive marriage equality, not just “gay marriage!” don’t leave the trans, nonconforming, and intersex people now seeing lessened legal barriers out of the celebration!
