First Lesson in Matthewese

Matthew has been attending speech therapy for about three months. He has shown great improvement. Before speech therapy and before he started wearing his hearing aids he rarely repeated words we would say to him. His vocabulary consisted of pointing out lights that he called, "la las". Now Matthew repeats words we say to him regularly. However, he usually does not repeat words correctly. For instance, he can say "D" words, ie. Daddy and Doggie. However, most other words if they start with a consonant he either exchanges the first letter with a D or just drops the first consanant and says the word by itself. For example, he calls his stuffed Piggy, "Iggy". However, he calls his stuffed Monkey, "Dunkee". The odd thing is that he can say the M sound, because he says Mama all of the time. This morning when he came into my bedroom saying with delight, "Mama!", while holding his monkey. I tried to get him to say "M" with another word referring to the monkey as "Mama Monkey". It is the larger of two monkeys he owned so it made sense. So I said, "Matthew, can you say Mama Monkey?" Matthew then said, "Da Da Dunkee."