Chapter 9

I read about the vocabulary explosion in this section. I took a linguistics course last year and part of the chapter was a review to me. In that class they said that the primary time to learn a language is before the age of 12. This book says basically the same thing. I found it interesting that a child only knows around 500 words at age 2 but jumps to 10,000 by the age of six. That's incredible. I feel like at age 20, I might learn a few different words here and there but I really have to focus and practice on learning them to remember different vocabulary. It comes naturally to children. This is why it is much easier to be bilingual as a child than to try and catch on later in life by taking classes to learn one. However, I hadn't heard of the processes called "fast mapping" or "logical extension". They make sense, but I never knew that that is how children learn to distinguish different words. When a child is learning to crawl and walk, a parent always says "come here!". I didn't know that that phrase is actually difficult to learn as a child. They have a hard time differentiating between here and there, up and down, and tall and short, comparison words. I feel as though those are words that are commonly used around children and they should've been picked up on easier. Children really just hear a bunch of different words and categorize them in their brain. The more new words a child hears, the easier it is to map other words. That's neat to hear and think about.