language

Today at work I listened to an episode of This American Life while working. The episode was #364 - Going Big and the first act was called Harlem Renaissance. A very fascinating story, especially given that we have three kids under two years old right now.

From the This American Life site:

Paul Tough reports on the Harlem Children’s Zone, and its CEO and president, Geoffrey Canada. Among the project’s many facets is Baby College, an 8-week program where young parents and parents-to-be learn how to help their children get the education they need to be successful. Tough’s just-published book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem’s Children Zone is called Whatever It Takes.

The biggest takeaways from the study they mention:

• Kids in ‘professional’ families hear 20 million more words than kids living in poverty during their first three years.
• The kids in the professional group hear 500,000 words of encouragement during this time and 80,000 words of discouragement. The poverty group was pretty much the opposite: 80,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement.
• The role of language in the first three years is more important than race, parent’s education, and economic factors in how kids develop and gain skills to be successful in the future. And those skills get increasingly more difficult to obtain as kids get older. So much so that job training classes (usually thought of as the way out of welfare for adults) has very little impact, if they don’t have the skills normally gained during their youth.

Really underscores the importance of reading and talking to your kids. And gives us hope that the cycle of poverty can be broken for many kids in the future. A lot of focus has been on pulling the parents out of poverty, but in reality it’s much simpler: it’s all about language.

If you are close to us and have spent time with Lucy, you know that she is a constant talker (she is my child after all!).  The Dr. calls her a little ahead in language (now if she could just change her own diaper!).  She started with Da-da, then Ma-ma, then cat (loves the cat), now up, dog, ball, that (constantly asking “whats that?” and pointing) and the list is growing.  She is also becoming more and more expressive, like screeching when she’s excited or to announce her presence when one of us don’t notice her behind us, inflecting her voice when she points like she is asking a question and can follow some simple commands.  She also laughs at stuff we do and she does.  Its so fun and her personality is starting to come out a lot more day by day.  She seems to have a lot to say about everything and when she is not talking she is usually crawling, climbing, taking things apart, opening things and generally being super busy all the time (often while talking at the same time!).  Even when I come in to get her in the morning in the crib, she is walking around and around her crib waving around her bear blanket.  The kid never stops!

So, I was doing some research on the interweb about language development and its interesting how young people develop their language (especially as a teacher).  By 12 months, most kids use about 1-5 words and by 18 months, this grows to about 7-20.  They also start using inflection by about 18 months too and will show emotion with body language.  Lucy now lays on the floor face down when she is tired- a little subtle huh?  They will also start using consonant sounds and lead to a spurt in vocabulary around 18 months.  By 19 months, they can understand up to 200 words and will pick up 10+ words a day!  Some can add a new word every 90 minutes!  Yikes!  They also start to combine words in sentences by the end of the second year and will express needs, wants, likes/dislikes and emotion.  Wow, that’s fast and simply amazing.  Its incredible to imagine how things will change when she can tell us what she wants and not.  Now its just trial and error!

Any stories about early language that you’d like to share?