Chatter boxes

Children are quite voracious learners. They are miniature vacuum cleaners of new words. They say 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 respond to 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 suggests at least some of its meaning, and with evident interest, carefully repeats it once, before moving on to something else. That 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.