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:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“He began therefore to invest the fortress of my heart by a circumvallation of distant bows and respectful looks; he then entrenched his forces in the deep caution of never uttering an unguarded word or syllable. His designs being yet covered, he played off from several quarters a large battery of compliments. But here he found a repulse from the enemy by an absolute rejection of such fulsome praise, and this forced him back again close into his former trenches.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)