Toddler Talk

*I found this short article from here.

This 19-month old toddler loves to hear her own voice, and is already quite a chatterbox. The dramatic vocabulary explosion that this study is probably not too far away. For now, she likes to say words like "book," "apple," mama," "dog" and "hat." In this picture she's saying one of her favorite words, "choo-choo."

If you know any toddlers, you’ve probably wondered what is going on in their heads as they put their (full) bowls on their head at mealtime or run around in circles, shrieking for no apparent reason.

There are lots of mysterious things about the toddler mind, but for scientists, one of the most interesting questions is how these pint-sized chatterboxes manage to learn words so quickly. By the time you’re an adult, you will have learned approximately 60,000 words. You’ve already learned many of those words, and, though you may not remember this, you learned an especially large number of words when you were around two and three years old.

Toddlers learn new words at an astonishingly fast rate, and researchers have called this the “vocabulary explosion.” Scientists have wondered for a long time how this is possible, and they’ve proposed that there might be some special part of the toddler brain that becomes active at this stage and speeds up word-learning.

A new study published in the 3 August issue of Science suggests a different explanation. In the study, Bob McMurray of the University of Iowa shows that that the vocabulary explosion could be related to the fact that languages generally have a lot of words that are kind of easy – but not super-easy – to learn. Young children begin by learning the very easiest, most common words, but there are not that many of these, so we don’t really notice any kind of language explosion.

But, then they move on to words that are just a little less common and a little more difficult. Languages have many of these words, so a vocabulary explosion occurs right at this stage. One of the interesting things about this idea is that toddlers are basically doing the same kind of word-learning that older children and adults do. In other words, a special “speed up” mechanism in the toddler brain isn’t necessary to explain the vocabulary explosion, as many scientists have suggested.

In his study, Dr. McMurray notes that any learning process that fits this general pattern (the easiest and hardest things being the least common, the in-between things are the most common) should have a similar period of rapid progress early on.

p/s: oh Balqis..obviously you are now in 'vocabulary explosion' phase : 32 months old