YOUNG children become chatterboxes within months of speaking just the occasional word. Now one scientist thinks he knows why.
Parents of small children will be familiar with the so-called 鈥渨ord spurt鈥�, when a child goes from barely talking to suddenly uttering hundreds of new words, sometimes after hearing them only once. have been suggested to explain this phenomenon. For instance, perhaps learning a few basic words helps a child learn others, or maybe children quickly understand that if there is a word they don鈥檛 recognise, it belongs to the object they can鈥檛 name.
Now language psychologist Bob McMurray at the University of Iowa in Iowa City has a simpler explanation. He believes that the acceleration in a child鈥檚 learning is down to the way most languages are structured. All languages, he says, contain a distribution of words where most are of medium difficulty and a few are either very easy or very difficult. Children learn all words in parallel, McMurray adds. He factored these rules into a computer model that simulated how long it would take to learn 10,000 new words.
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Each simulation produced the same pattern: essentially, a child masters the small number of easy words, but has simultaneously been working on the medium difficulty words. Soon afterwards they master these as well, but it feels like a burst because there are more of them. 鈥淎cceleration is an unavoidable by-product of variation in difficulty,鈥� says McMurray ().
