Chatter boxes

A word an hour

Children are miniature vacuum cleaners of new words. They are quite voracious learners. They learn very energetically, saying up to 30,000 words a day, and learning a word a day well enough to use it, and learning a word an hour well enough to understand it.

Sometimes this process can be directly observed as the child is paying attention to adult conversation,hears a word for the first time in a situation which seems to make its meaning clear, and with evident interest, carefully repeats it. That single experience seems to be enough to enter a new item into the child’s lexicon. Of course, how well the new word is now known it is impossible to say.

The numbers here were the surprising result of an experiment in 1985 by Klaus Wagner. Radio mics were sewn into children’s clothing so that every word they said could be recorded, transcribed and counted.

Children talk about the same things in the same ways in the same approximate orders, no matter where they live or what language they are learning.

Conversation and the structures of speech and language are a major focus of a small child’s attention.