Where do words begin?

The incredible way babies learn to talk is a YouTube channel video from @RobWords and just under twenty minutes. If you want to learn to communicate with dolphins, I encourage you to watch it.

I asked my son to send me his source for something because I talked to him about an anecdote I told in Toddler Speech recently:

At twelve, I instantly knew the moment she said it why I called my sister the nickname I couldn't remember having called her. I couldn't understand why no one in the family ever recognized it as "the short form" of her name the exact equivalent of my mother calling me Dorena for years and people shortening it to Rena as a nickname.

For privacy reasons, I didn't give my sister's name in that post.

Her name is Vivian and English speakers pronounce that VIV-ee-yen.

My mother called her Vivianna for many years:

vee-vee-YAN-na.

So per the video linked above, most English words are stressed on the first syllable and some words like banana don't follow that pattern and this contributes to toddlers saying Nana for banana.

Because they are looking for signals for where a word begins and in English, stressed syllables are typically the start of a word.

So as a toddler, in addition to having trouble pronouncing v and f, my mother stressed the third syllable of my sister's name in a four syllable variation and I likely thought that last part was my sister's name because I thought stressed syllables started words because I grew up speaking English.

So I called her Yay-ma.