Language Development in Childerns

A child growing up in Sweden with Swedish-speaking parents will learn about a 1000 words by the time it is 3 years old. You may ask how a little child can learn so many words. Or how do we actually learn to speak?

When a newborn child cries, it mostly does so, because it is hungry, cold, or tired. A baby can make other sounds such as, burping, coughing, or suckling sounds when being fed. A baby will listen to its mother, father, brothers, and sisters talk, The baby will move its arms and legs to the rhythm of the speech that it hears. Even when the baby is in the mother's womb, it feels safe when it hears mother's voice talking.

Small children gurgle, grunt, and babble quite a lot and by the age of about 6 months the child will start to use sounds such as "ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga". It almost feels like you can talk to the baby, but a Swedish child does not start to use real words until it is about one year old. At that time, it is common that a child will begin to say words like "mama" and "dada". Sometimes the words will not sound exactly the way they should, for example "kacka" will be used for "clock" or "ajaj" for "cat". It is usually quite easy to figure out what the child is saying, because they usually point to the things they are talking about. For example, a child might point to a lamp on the ceiling and say "da", and the mother might interpret this as "Look! There is something hanging there!" and respond by saying something like: "Yes, there is a lamp!

Eventually the child's pronunciation becomes more distinct. By the time, the child is about 2 years old; it will be able to put words together, but only two words at a time. The child will say things like "there ball" or "doll away". The child will start to learn words at a very fast pace.

Before a child's third birthday, they have learned how to put several words together and the child will be able to construct whole sentences. For example: "There is the ball" or "My doll is over there". A two-year old talks about things that are in the same room or that they are playing with just at that moment. A three-year old will talk about things that happened before. For example they will tell what they did at grandmother's last week: "We chased each other and runned on the grass". They start to use past tense forms of words, such as "chased" instead of "chase". Learning the past tense takes awhile to learn, and it is quite common that a child will conjugate all verbs in the same way, for example, "runned" instead of "ran".

A three-year old knows about a 1000 words and is good at putting them together into sentences and making himself understood. However language keeps developing, especially when we begin school. Researchers have estimated that we learn 40,000 - 50,000 new words during the first nine years of school. That means that you learn about 100 new words per week at school. Certain words you during language class, but you also learn new words in other subjects, such as multiplication, economic growth, photosynthesis, and chisel. You also learn how to read and write, and eventually you might learn how to speak another language