24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Word Explosion in Infants
Babies first bridge the gap between sounds and meaning as early as nine or ten months of age. They learn the names of family members and pets, the meaning of no! and perhaps a few general labels like shoe and cookie. By his first birthday, the average child understands around seventy words, mostly nouns like people's names and terms for objects, but also certain social expressions, like hi and bye-bye. Of course, he cannot say nearly that many. The median number of words spoken by a one-year-... 1 
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notesWhen children learn about four-dozen words, they suddenly begin to learn many more at an accelerated pace.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Nature of Language Affects a Child's Understanding of...
It turns out that, just by the nature of the grammar of their languages, Korean- and English-speaking parents talk about the world quite differently. Korean (like Latin or French) uses an elaborate system of different verb endings to convey different meanings. As a consequence, Korean-speaking parents can, and often do, omit nouns altogether when they talk to their children. A Korean mother can say the equivalent of "moving in" when she sees the baby put a block in a cup, without saying anyth... 1 notes
notesKorean mothers focus of describing the world in verbs, English mothers focus on nouns; as a result, Korean children are better physical problem solvers while English children are better at understanding how objects fit together associatively.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
When Babies Learn Categorization
However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there behind the screen. But young babies seem content to think the toy somehow magically became a new kind of thing behind the screen. The particular kind of category-crossing magic tric... 1 notes
notesBy three years of age, children develop a fairly sophisticated sense of categorization. Perhaps a playing close attention to taxonomy will benefit the child at this stage in their development.
