Chapter 6 Blog Post #2

While reading Chapter 6, I also found the topic of naming explosion interesting. The naming explosion usually begins around 18 months of age and refers to the phenomenon that an infant’s vocabulary increases dramatically. It occurs after the baby has muttered their first words and begins to vocalize in a language-specific form rather than universal babbling. The naming explosion is a ‘”growth spurt” of vocabulary, particularly growing with the number of nouns spoken. This language spurt begins after an infant has spoken about 50 expressed words, with the key word being that these words only have to be expressed words rather than understood words. After this stage, infants begin learning very quickly, spewing out 50-100 new words each month. Most of these words are made up of a structure of two identical syllables (for example, doo-doo or nana). While reading this section, I wondered what my naming explosion stage was like because Chinese was my first language. In Chinese, many nouns cannot be made into this word structure of two repeating syllables. Unlike English, multiple “characters” make up words instead of syllables. Therefore, words do not contain this structure where the syllables repeat. I think this makes it a little bit more difficult for a baby to learn during this name explosion stage because the syllables are not repeated. It would be interesting to see how this naming explosion phenomenon differs within cultures that have very contrasting languages.