18 Month Old Vocab Explosion

In class the other day we were talking about how children learn words slowly and then have an explosion in there vocabulary. But I was very curious as to how and why children experience a vocabulary explosion around 18 months of age. In an article on ScienceDaily there was an article on just this topic. Professor Bob McMurray at the University of Iowa found that it is not a complex explanation for this phenomenon but is rather simple. He said that “The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones.” He says that simply by repeating words over time along with varying the difficulty of the words and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once all account for this dramatic increase in vocabulary. “Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold,” McMurray said. “They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion.” As long as there are more difficult words than easy ones, the vocabulary explosion is guaranteed. But since there are few words in any language that are used an overwhelming number of times in ordinary speech the frequency of use is considered as a measure of degree of difficulty, and thus showing that languages have many more difficult words than easy ones according to McMurray.

I found this article to be very interesting about the explosion of vocabulary. I also thought that it was interesting in class when we were talking about when parents orient to their children’s gaze and then tell them the word that they will understand it better than if the parent just shows them an object and tells them the name of it. It makes sense that this would happen because the child would already be interested in the object and wants to learn more about it. I also think that reading at least one book to your child every day, encouraging the child to repeat short sentences, and reading rhymes with interesting sounds, especially those accompanied by actions or pictures would also increase the vocabulary for the child. It is just amazing to me the whole developmental process and how language is acquired.