Hi Ladies,
I am reading a really interesting book called "How to talk to your baby - A guide to maximizing your child's language and learning skills" by Dorothy P. Dougherty. Here are a few things I have learned, hope you can find this helpful:
- According to research conducted by Janellen Huttenlocher, the actual size of a toddler's vocabulary is strongly correlated with how much his/her mother talks. Dr. Huttenlocker found that at twenty months old, the children of chatty mothers averaged 131 more words than the children of mothers who didn't speak much. At two years of age, the gap more than doubled!
- According to Ellen Markman, a Stanford University phychologist, nwhen children begin to say words, what they don't need to know is all of the meanings of every word in the language. THis is because they start with three basic assumptions that help simplify what words mean. First, children figure out that labels refer to whole objects, not just a part or a quality of something. For example, they understand that the word 'cup' refers to the whole item, not just the handle.
Second, children assume that a word label does not refer to just one thing, but a class of things. That enables them to make generalizations, although not always correct ones. For example, an incorrect generalization that some children make is that, because a beach ball and a baseball is a ball, an orange is a ball.
Third, children assume that anything with a name has only one name.
Hope you find this interesting.. and can relate or disagree with these - I'll try to post some more things as I'm reading the book :)