Vocabulary Development in School-age Children
Vocabulary development during the school years builds upon what the child already knows, and the child uses this knowledge to broaden his or her vocabulary. Once children have gained a level of vocabulary knowledge, new words are learned through explanations using familiar, or "old" words. This is done either explicitly, when a new word is defined using old words, or implicitly, when the word is set in the context of old words so that the meaning of the new word is constrained. When children reach school-age, context and implicit learning are the most common ways in which their vocabularies continue to develop. By this time, children learn new vocabulary mostly through conversation and reading. Throughout schooling and adulthood, conversation and reading are the main methods in which vocabulary develops. This growth tends to slow once a person finishes schooling, as they have already acquired the vocabulary used in everyday conversation and reading material and generally are not engaging in activities that require additional vocabulary development.
During the first few years of life, children are mastering concrete words (e.g., car, bottle, dog, cat). By age 3, children are likely able to learn these concrete words without the need for a visual reference, so word learning tends to accelerate around this age. Once children reach school-age, they learn abstract words (e.g., love, freedom, success). This broadens the vocabulary available for children to learn, which helps to account for the increase in word learning evident at school age. By age 5, children tend to have an expressive vocabulary of 2,100-2,200 words. By age 6, they have approximately 2,600 words of expressive vocabulary and 20,000-24,000 words of receptive vocabulary. Many claim that children experience a sudden acceleration in word learning, upwards of 20 words per day, but it tends to be much more gradual than this. From age 6 to 8, the average child in school is learning 6-7 words per day, and from age 8 to 12, approximately 12 words per day.
Read more about this topic: Vocabulary Development
Famous quotes containing the words vocabulary, development and/or children:
“Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Love is at the root of all healthy discipline. The desire to be loved is a powerful motivation for children to behave in ways that give their parents pleasure rather than displeasure. it may even be our own long-ago fear of losing our parents’ love that now sometimes makes us uneasy about setting and maintaining limits. We’re afraid we’ll lose the love of our children when we don’t let them have their way.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)