>My daughter explained to me the other day that she pulled her ice
>cream away from a pigeon because he "mightened of eatened it". She
>was misapplying a rule of tense, adding too many endings.
I was trying to think of an example of what I meant by my daughter talking before I could understand her. I remember now that she used to say "fee fo" and it took a while to figure out what she was saying. Noticing when she did it was one clue but the thing that really made it clear was the inflection. For her "fee fo" meant "careful" and she was mimicking the way she heard it. I'm only speaking from experience here but it seems to me that this suggests kids know or learn a lot about, I don't know how to say it, the music or melody of language before they begin making grammatically coherent sentences or even forming real words.