{"id":1933,"date":"2013-06-24T21:17:10","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T20:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1933"},"modified":"2013-06-24T21:17:10","modified_gmt":"2013-06-24T20:17:10","slug":"its-a-little-monkeys-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/its-a-little-monkeys-world\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s a Little Monkey’s world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThe Little Monkey is a talkative young simian, and I thought it’d be interesting to use his vocabulary to reflect on his interests, on the eve of his second birthday. I only consider words that he says, rather than those I judge him to understand; and I include words where his pronunciation might only be comprehensible to Mrs. Monkeyshines and I. Writing down all the words that he knows would be tedious in the extreme, so I picked a subset of words beginning with certain letters. As a scientist, I know this skews the results in an unpredictable way, but since this blog isn’t peer-reviewed, I think I can get away with it. There are just over 100 words in the corpus, which is not enough to draw firm conclusions, but I shall do so anyway…\n<\/p>\n

\nI expected the list to be dominated by nouns, and it is (75%), but I didn’t realise the Little Monkey knew so many verbs (17%); the remaining portion is a small set of adjectives, adverbs, and exclamations. Many of the nouns don’t fall into neat categories, but some do, and highlight what constitutes the Little Monkey’s sphere of interest. 17% are items of food (fruit: 4%), and 13% are household objects; clothes, body-parts, and colours all register too, albeit with low percentages due to the small sample size.\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A twitcher-in-training?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n‘People’ (9%) and places (4%) account for another chunk of words. ‘People’ is in quotes because he doesn’t have any friends whose name begins with the chosen letters, but he does know a bunch of fictional characters’ names. A couple are from books, one is the elephant on his changing mat, but most are from TV programmes.\n<\/p>\n

\nChildren’s TV and books are crammed with different animals, and it’s no surprise that they make up 12% of his vocabulary; perhaps more unexpected is that half of those are different types of bird. If he becomes a renowned ornithologist in later life, we’ll be able to say it all started here…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Little Monkey is a talkative young simian, and I thought it’d be interesting to use his vocabulary to reflect on his interests, on the eve of his second birthday. I only consider words that he says, rather than those I judge him to understand; and I include words where his pronunciation might only be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paternal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1938,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions\/1938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monkeyshines.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}