Vocabulary Spurt

During a child's first years of life, they go from learning words slowly to become expert word learners. We call this the vocabulary spurt, but what is behind this process? We found that a child's experience with language plays a role in the vocabulary spurt. Children that listen more to a language showed an earlier and larger spurt in that language. When looking at their combined languages, the spurt happened earlier and was bigger for children who listened to a lot of one language and less of the other, compared to those who listened to both languages for similar amounts of time. The speed at which children learn words will be different from one child to another, in part because they listen to languages differently. If a child is learning two languages, they might learn words at different speeds in each.

An open access version of this paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dhpm3.