Vocabulary development

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Reading is an important means through which children develop their vocabulary.

Early word learning[edit]

Children begin to produce their first words when they are approximately one year old.[1][2] 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".[2] 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.[3] 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.

Phonological development[edit]

Studies related to vocabulary development show that children's language competence depends upon their ability to hear sounds during infancy.[1][4][5] Infants' perception of speech is distinct. Between six and ten months of age, infants can discriminate sounds used in the languages of the world.[1] By 10 to 12 months, infants can no longer discriminate between speech sounds that are not used in the language(s) to which they are exposed.[1] Among six-month old infants, seen articulations (i.e. the mouth movements they observe others make while talking) actually enhance their ability to discriminate sounds, and may also contribute to infants' ability to learn phonemic boundaries.[6] Infants' phonological register is completed between the ages of 18 months and 7 years.[1]

Children's phonological development normally proceeds as follows:[1]

6–8 weeks: Cooing appears

16 weeks: Laughter and vocal play appear

6–9 months: Reduplicated (canonical) babbling appears

12 months: First words use a limited sound repertoire


18 months–7 years: Phonological inventory completion

At each stage mentioned above, children play with sounds and learn methods to help them learn words.[4] There is a relationship between children's prelinguistic phonetic skills and their lexical progress at age two: failure to develop the required phonetic skills in their prelinguistic period results in children's delay in producing words.[7] Environmental influences may affect children's phonological development, such as hearing loss as a result of ear infections.[1] Deaf infants and children with hearing problems due to infections are usually delayed in the beginning of vocal babbling.


Main article: Babbling

Babbling is an important aspect of vocabulary development in infants, since it appears to help practice producing speech sounds.[8] Babbling begins between five and seven months of age. At this stage, babies start to play with sounds that are not used to express their emotional or physical states, such as sounds of consonants and vowels.[4] Babies begin to babble in real syllables such as "ba-ba-ba, neh-neh-neh, and dee-dee-dee,"[4] between the ages of seven and eight months; this is known as canonical babbling.[1] Jargon babbling includes strings of such sounds; this type of babbling uses intonation but doesn't convey meaning. The phonemes and syllabic patterns produced by infants begin to be distinctive to particular languages during this period (e.g., increased nasal sounds in French and Japanese babies) though most of their sounds are similar.[1][4] There is a shift from babbling to the use of words as the infant grows.[9]

Vocabulary spurt[edit]

As children get older their rate of vocabulary growth increases. Children probably understand their first 50 words before they produce them. By the age of eighteen months, children typically attain a vocabulary of 50 words in production, and between two to three times greater in comprehension.[2][4] A switch from an early stage of slow vocabulary growth to a later stage of faster growth is referred to as the vocabulary spurt.[10] Young toddlers acquire one to three words per month. A vocabulary spurt often occurs overtime as the number of words learned accelerates. It is believed that most children add about 10 to 20 new words a week.[10] Between the ages of 18 to 24 months, children learn how to combine two words such as no bye-bye and more please.[2] Three-word and four-word combinations appear when most of the child's utterances are two-word productions. In addition, children are able to form conjoined sentences, using and.[2] This suggests that there is a vocabulary spurt between the time that the child's first word appears, and when the child is able to form more than two words, and eventually, sentences. However, there have been arguments as to whether or not there is a spurt in acquisition of words. Only about one in five children do have a spurt.[10] This suggests that most children do not have a vocabulary spurt.

Mapping problem[edit]

In word learning, the mapping problem refers to the question of how infants attach the forms of language to the things that they experience in the world.[11] There are infinite objects, concepts, and actions in the world that words could be mapped onto.[11] Many theories have been proposed to account for the way in which the language learner successfully maps words onto the correct objects, concepts, and actions.

While domain-specific accounts of word learning argue for innate constraints that limit infants' hypotheses about word meanings,[12] domain-general perspectives argue that word learning can be accounted for by general cognitive processes, such as learning and memory, which are not specific to language.[13] Yet other theorists have proposed social pragmatic accounts, which stress the role of caregivers in guiding infants through the word learning process.[14] According to some[who?] research, however, children are active participants in their own word learning, although caregivers may still play an important role in this process.[15][16] Recently, an emergentist coalition model has also been proposed to suggest that word learning cannot be fully attributed to a single factor. Instead, a variety of cues, including salient and social cues, may be utilized by infants at different points in their vocabulary development.[17]

Theories of constraints[edit]

Theories of constraints argue for biases or default assumptions that guide the infant through the word learning process. Constraints are outside of the infant's control and are believed to help the infant limit their hypotheses about the meaning of words that they encounter daily.[12][18] Constraints can be considered domain-specific (unique to language).

Critics[who?] argue that theories of constraints focus on how children learn nouns, but ignore other aspects of their word learning.[19] Although constraints are useful in explaining how children limit possible meanings when learning novel words, the same constraints would eventually need to be overridden because they are not utilized in adult language.[20] For instance, adult speakers often use several terms, each term meaning something slightly different, when referring to one entity, such as a family pet. This practice would violate the mutual exclusivity constraint.[20]

Below, the most prominent constraints in the literature are detailed:

  • Reference is the notion that a word symbolizes or stands in for an object, action, or event.[21] Words consistently stand for their referents, even if referents are not physically present in context.[21]
  • Mutual Exclusivity is the assumption that each object in the world can only be referred to by a single label.[12][22]
  • Shape has been considered to be one of the most critical properties for identifying members of an object category.[23] Infants assume that objects that have the same shape also share a name.[24] Shape plays an important role in both appropriate and inappropriate extensions.[23]
  • The Whole Object Assumption is the belief that labels refer to whole objects instead of parts or properties of those objects.[12][25] Children are believed to hold this assumption because they typically label whole objects first, and parts of properties of objects later in development.[25]
  • The Taxonomic Assumption reflects the belief that speakers use words to refer to categories that are internally consistent.[26] Labels to pick out coherent categories of objects, rather than those objects and the things that are related to them.[12][26] For example, children assume that the word "dog" refers to the category of "dogs", not to "dogs with bones", or "dogs chasing cats".[26]

Domain-general views[edit]

Domain-general views of vocabulary development argue that children do not need principles or constraints in order to successfully develop word-world mappings.[13] Instead, word learning can be accounted for through general learning mechanisms such as salience, association, and frequency.[13] Children are thought to notice the objects, actions, or events that are most salient in context, and then to associate them with the words that are most frequently used in their presence.[13] Additionally, research on word learning suggests that fast mapping, the rapid learning that children display after a single exposure to new information, is not specific to word learning. Children can also successfully fast map when exposed to a novel fact, remembering both words and facts after a time delay.[19]

Domain-general views have been criticized for not fully explaining how children manage to avoid mapping errors when there are numerous possible referents to which objects, actions, or events might point.[27] For instance, if biases are not present from birth, why do infants assume that labels refer to whole objects, instead of salient parts of these objects?[27] However, domain-general perspectives do not dismiss the notion of biases. Rather, they suggest biases develop through learning strategies instead of existing as built-in constraints. For instance, the whole object bias could be explained as a strategy that humans use to reason about the world; perhaps we are prone to thinking about our environment in terms of whole objects, and this strategy is not specific to the language domain.[19] Additionally, children may be exposed to cues associated with categorization by shape early in the word learning process, which would draw their attention to shape when presented with novel objects and labels.[28] Ordinary learning could, then, lead to a shape bias.[28]

Social pragmatic theories[edit]

Social pragmatic theories, also in contrast to the constraints view, focus on the social context in which the infant is embedded.[14] According to this approach, environmental input removes the ambiguity of the word learning situation.[14] Cues such as the caregiver's gaze, body language, gesture, and smile help infants to understand the meanings of words.[14] Social pragmatic theories stress the role of the caregiver in talking about objects, actions, or events that the infant is already focused-in upon.[14]

Joint attention is an important mechanism through which children learn to map words-to-world, and vice versa.[29] Adults commonly make an attempt to establish joint attention with a child before they convey something to the child. Joint attention is often accompanied by physical co-presence, since children are often focused on what is in their immediate environment.[29] As well, conversational co-presence is likely to occur; the caregiver and child typically talk together about whatever is taking place at their locus of joint attention.[29] Social pragmatic perspectives often present children as covariation detectors, who simply associate the words that they hear with whatever they are attending to in the world at the same time.[30] The co-variation detection model of joint attention seems problematic when we consider that many caregiver utterances do not refer to things that occupy the immediate attentional focus of infants. For instance, caregivers among the Kaluli, a group of indigenous peoples living in New Guinea, rarely provide labels in the context of their referents.[30] While the covariation detection model emphasizes the caregiver's role in the meaning-making process, some theorists[who?] argue that infants also play an important role in their own word learning, actively avoiding mapping errors.[16] When infants are in situations where their own attentional focus differs from that of a speaker, they seek out information about the speaker's focus, and then use that information to establish correct word-referent mappings.[15][30] Joint attention can be created through infant agency, in an attempt to gather information about a speaker's intent.[30]

From early on, children also assume that language is designed for communication. Infants treat communication as a cooperative process.[31] Specifically, infants observe the principles of conventionality and contrast. According to conventionality, infants believe that for a particular meaning that they wish to convey, there is a term that everyone in the community would expect to be used.[31][32] According to contrast, infants act according to the notion that differences in form mark differences in meaning.[31][32] Children's attention to conventionality and contrast is demonstrated in their language use, even before the age of 2 years; they direct their early words towards adult targets, repair mispronunciations quickly if possible, ask for words to relate to the world around them, and maintain contrast in their own word use.[31]

Emergentist coalition model[edit]

The emergentist coalition model suggests that children make use of multiple cues to successfully attach a novel label to a novel object.[17] The word learning situation may offer an infant combinations of social, perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic cues. While a range of cues are available from the start of word learning, it may be the case that not all cues are utilized by the infant when they begin the word learning process.[17] While younger children may only be able to detect a limited number of cues, older, more experienced word learners may be able to make use of a range of cues. For instance, young children seem to focus primarily on perceptual salience, but older children attend to the gaze of caregivers and use the focus of caregivers to direct their word mapping.[17] Therefore, this model argues that principles or cues may be present from the onset of word learning, but the use of a wide range of cues develops over time.[33]

Supporters of the emergentist coalition model argue that, as a hybrid, this model moves towards a more holistic explanation of word learning that is not captured by models with a singular focus. For instance, constraints theories typically argue that constraints/principles are available to children from the onset of word learning, but do not explain how children develop into expert speakers who are not limited by constraints.[34] Additionally, some argue[who?] that domain-general perspectives do not fully address the question of how children sort through numerous potential referents in order to correctly sort out meaning.[34] Lastly, social pragmatic theories claim that social encounters guide word learning. Although these theories describe how children become more advanced word learners, they seem to tell us little about children's capacities at the start of word learning.[34] According to its proponents, the emergentist coalion model incorporates constraints/principles, but argues for the development and change in these principles over time, while simultaneously taking into consideration social aspects of word learning alongside other cues, such as salience.[35]

Pragmatic development[edit]

Both linguistic and socio-cultural factors affect the rate at which vocabulary develops.[36] Children must learn to use their words appropriately and strategically in social situations.[37] They have flexible and powerful social-cognitive skills that allow them to understand the communicative intentions of others in a wide variety of interactive situations. Children learn new words in communicative situations.[38] Children rely on pragmatic skills to build more extensive vocabularies.[39] Some aspects of pragmatic behaviour can predict later literacy and mathematical achievement, as children who are pragmatically skilled often function better in school. These children are also generally better liked.[40]



Pragmatic influences[edit]





Pragmatic directions[edit]


Vocabulary development in school-age children[edit]

Children in school share an interactive reading experience.

Vocabulary development during the school years builds upon what the child already knows, and the child uses this knowledge to broaden his or her vocabulary. Once children have gained a level of vocabulary knowledge, new words are learned through explanations using familiar, or "old" words. This is done either explicitly, when a new word is defined using old words, or implicitly, when the word is set in the context of old words so that the meaning of the new word is constrained.[51] When children reach school-age, context and implicit learning are the most common ways in which their vocabularies continue to develop.[52] By this time, children learn new vocabulary mostly through conversation and reading.[53] Throughout schooling and adulthood, conversation and reading are the main methods in which vocabulary develops. This growth tends to slow once a person finishes schooling, as they have already acquired the vocabulary used in everyday conversation and reading material and generally are not engaging in activities that require additional vocabulary development.[51][54]

During the first few years of life, children are mastering concrete words such as "car", "bottle", "dog", "cat". By age 3, children are likely able to learn these concrete words without the need for a visual reference, so word learning tends to accelerate around this age.[55] Once children reach school-age, they learn abstract words (e.g. "love", "freedom", "success").[56] This broadens the vocabulary available for children to learn, which helps to account for the increase in word learning evident at school age.[57] By age 5, children tend to have an expressive vocabulary of 2,100–2,200 words. By age 6, they have approximately 2,600 words of expressive vocabulary and 20,000–24,000 words of receptive vocabulary.[58] Many claim[who?] that children experience a sudden acceleration in word learning, upwards of 20 words per day,[54] but it tends to be much more gradual than this. From age 6 to 8, the average child in school is learning 6–7 words per day, and from age 8 to 12, approximately 12 words per day.[19]

Means for vocabulary development[edit]


Reading is considered to be a key element of vocabulary development in school-age children.[51][58][59][60] Before children are able to read on their own, children can learn from others reading to them. Learning vocabulary from these experiences includes using context, as well as explicit explanations of words and/or events in the story.[61] This may be done using illustrations in the book to guide explanation and provide a visual reference or comparisons, usually to prior knowledge and past experiences.[62] Interactions between the adult and the child often include the child's repetition of the new word back to the adult.[63] When a child begins to learn to read, their print vocabulary and oral vocabulary tend to be the same, as children use their vocabulary knowledge to match verbal forms of words with written forms. These two forms of vocabulary are usually equal up until grade 3. Because written language is much more diverse than spoken language, print vocabulary begins to expand beyond oral vocabulary.[64] By age 10, children's vocabulary development through reading moves away from learning concrete words to learning abstract words.[65]


Physical context[edit]


Prior knowledge[edit]


Social context[edit]


Semantic support[edit]


Memory and vocabulary development[edit]


The phonology of words has proven to be beneficial to vocabulary development when children begin school. Once children have developed a vocabulary, they utilize the sounds that they already know to learn new words.[70] The phonological loop encodes, maintains and manipulates speech-based information that a person encounters. This information is then stored in the phonological memory, a part of short term memory. Research shows that children's capacities in the area of phonological memory are linked to vocabulary knowledge when children first begin school at age 4–5 years old. As memory capabilities tend to increase with age (between age 4 and adolescence), so does an individual's ability to learn more complex vocabulary.[70]

Serial-order short-term memory may be critical to the development of vocabulary.[71] As lexical knowledge increases, phonological representations have to become more precise to determine the differences between similar sound words (i.e. "calm", "come"). In this theory, the specific order or sequence of phonological events is used to learn new words, rather than phonology as a whole.[71]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Hoff 2005.
  2. ^ a b c d e Hulit & Howard 2002.
  3. ^ Barner, Zapf & Lui 2012.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Pinker 1994.
  5. ^ Waxman & Booth 2000.
  6. ^ Teinonen et al. 2008.
  7. ^ Keren-Portnoy, Majorano & Vihman 2009.
  8. ^ Fagan 2009.
  9. ^ Vihman 1993.
  10. ^ a b c Ganger & Brent 2004.
  11. ^ a b Bloom 2000, p. 22.
  12. ^ a b c d e Clark 2009, p. 284.
  15. ^ a b Baldwin 1995.
  17. ^ a b c d Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff & Hollich 2000, p. 145.
  18. ^ Bloom 2000, p. 20.
  19. ^ a b c d e Bloom & Markson 1998.
  20. ^ a b Clark 1993, p. 53.
  22. ^ Merriman, Bowman & MacWhinney 1989, p. 3.
  23. ^ a b Clark 1993, p. 45.
  24. ^ Smith 2000, p. 52.
  25. ^ a b Clark 1993, p. 50.
  26. ^ a b c Clark 1993, p. 52.
  28. ^ a b Smith 2000, p. 55.
  29. ^ a b c Clark 2009, p. 285.
  30. ^ a b c d Sabbagh & Baldwin 2005.
  31. ^ a b c d Clark 2009, p. 286.
  32. ^ a b Clark 1993, p. 64.
  33. ^ Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff & Hollich 2000, p. 146.
  35. ^ Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff & Hollich 2000, p. 160.
  36. ^ a b Tardif et al. 2009.
  37. ^ Bryant 2009, p. 339.
  38. ^ Tomasello 2000.
  39. ^ a b c d e Clark 1978.
  40. ^ a b Bryant 2009, pp. 352–353.
  41. ^ Bryant 2009, p. 342.
  42. ^ Bryant 2009, pp. 342–343.
  43. ^ Bryant 2009, pp. 343–345.
  44. ^ Bryant 2009, p. 348.
  45. ^ Bryant 2009, pp. 348–349.
  46. ^ Bryant 2009, pp. 350–351.
  47. ^ Bryant 2009, p. 351.
  48. ^ Chan et al. 2011.
  49. ^ a b Clark & Grossman 1998.
  50. ^ Clark & Andrew 2002.
  51. ^ a b c Baker, Simmons & Kameenui 1995.
  52. ^ Newton, Padak & Rasinski 2008, pp. 7–8.
  53. ^ Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, pp. 93–110.
  54. ^ a b Anglin & Miller 2000.
  55. ^ Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, p. 103.
  56. ^ Nippold 2004, pp. 1–8.
  57. ^ McKeown & Curtis 1987, p. 7.
  58. ^ a b Lorraine 2008.
  59. ^ a b Newton, Padak & Rasinski 2008.
  60. ^ a b Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, p. 97.
  61. ^ Nagy, Herman & Anderson 1985.
  62. ^ Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, pp. 101–103.
  63. ^ Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, pp. 101.
  64. ^ Kamil & Hiebert 2005.
  65. ^ McKeown & Curtis 1987, p. 8.
  66. ^ a b c Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, p. 105.
  67. ^ Newton, Padak & Rasinski 2008, pp. xvii.
  68. ^ a b Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, pp. 106.
  69. ^ a b Tabors, Beals & Weizman 2001, pp. 107.
  70. ^ a b Gathercole et al. 1992.
  71. ^ a b Leclercq & Majerus 2010.


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