I go for humor also. My little one, 21 months, loves to play with us with this kind of thing and has been for a few months now. She is constantly calling green purple or the other way around. She likes to call chairs couches and couches chairs. It took me a little bit to realize she was playing with us. I thought she was going through somekind of re-practicing or learning. She calls her sissy mommy and that one bugs me because her sissy is ten years older and I don't want her to be in the mother roll. I have younger siblings who I felt over responsible for...anyways now that she has some indication that it bothers me ohhh wow she pulls it out of her hat at times...
As for the language thing... my little one had over 300 words at 18 months and she hardly spoke in sentences or put words together. It got a bit hard to tell when she was just naming something and when she wanted something about what she was naming. So with a bit of encouragment I asked for more and she actually started to give it to me. Like I want such and such instead of just naming it. It slowed some of the temper tantrums down. She did a 6 word sentence about a month ago and now she is doing 4 word sentences more regularly with the occassional long knock your socks off kind.
She signed her first long sentence (5 signs) when she was like 16 or something months and I held onto that through all the one word utterances. I think that the use of sign is the use of language and takes the same cognitive skills to put together a signed sentence as a spoken sentence it just takes different muscles. I have not read anything to the contrary but if someone has info that way I would be interested in it. My older daughter was immersed in ASL for the first year and half of her life. I have this video of her signing a beautiful poetic signs when she was like 16 or so months... It was only a few signs but the facial expressions and movement was like wow. All about the birds that lived in the trees.
