When she was younger, Katie would raise up both hands and say, "hold you!" -- meaning, of course, "hold me!" It was adorable. Alas, she's getting grammatically correct in her old age.
Interestingly, it turns out her mistake is a well-documented one. In Steven Pinker's fascinating book The Language Instinct (highly recommended!), the author describes psychologist Laura Ann Peitto's observation that even deaf babies learning American Sign Language reverse their me's and you's:
Now, in ASL, the sign for me is a point to one's chest; the sign for "you" is a point to one's partner. What could be more transparent? One would expect it using "you" and "me" in ASL would be foolproof as knowing how to point, which all babies, deaf and hearing, do before their first birthday.
But for the deaf children Petitto studied, pointing is not pointing. The children used the sign of pointing to their conversational partners to mean "me" at exactly the age at which hearing children use the spoken sound you to mean "me." The children were using the gesture as a pure linguistic symbol; the fact that it pointed somewhere did not register as being relevant. This attitude is appropriate in learning sign languages; in ASL, the pointing hand-shape is like a meaningless consonant or vowel, found as a component of many other signs, like "candy" and "ugly."
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