Vocabulary Development - Early Word Learning

Early Word Learning

Children begin to produce their first words when they are approximately one year old. Infants' first words are normally used in reference to things that are of importance to them, such as objects, people, and relevant actions. Also, the first words that infants produce are mostly single-syllabic or repeated single syllables, such as no and dada. By 12 to 18 months of age, children's vocabularies often contain words such as kitty, bottle, doll, car, and eye. Children's understanding of names for objects and people usually precedes their understanding of words that describe actions and relationships. One and two are the first number words that children learn between the ages of one and two. Infants must be able to hear and play with sounds in their environment, and to break up various phonetic units to discover words and their related meanings.

Read more about this topic:  Vocabulary Development

Famous quotes containing the words early, word and/or learning:

    Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
    Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)

    Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I think it is better to show love by meeting needs than to keep telling my son that I love him. Right now he is learning to tie his shoes. He is old enough, so even though it’s hard for him, sometimes I insist. But once in a while when I see he’s tired I still do it for him, and I have noticed that while I am tying his shoe, he says, “I love you, Mommy.” When he says, “I love you,” I know that he knows that he is loved.
    Anonymous Parent (20th century)