Chapter 04 of 5
The Language Explosion
How children go from babbling to thousands of words.
- Before Birth
Listening in the womb
Newborns prefer their mother's voice and the rhythms of the language they heard before birth.
- Universal Ears
Every sound at first
Young babies can tell apart speech sounds from almost any language, including sounds their parents can't distinguish.
- Tuning In
Losing some sounds
By around their first birthday, babies become specialised in their own language's sounds and lose some ability to hear foreign contrasts.
17 more cards in this chapter
Could you answer this?
What do children's mistakes like 'goed' and 'mouses' show?
👶 The Developing Mind
- 01Out of Sight, Out of Mind?Piaget's stages — and how much more babies know than he thought.
- 02The Need to Be HeldAttachment — from Harlow's monkeys to how children feel secure.
- 03Reading Other MindsWhen children realise other people can believe different things.
- 04The Language ExplosionHow children go from babbling to thousands of words.
- 05The Teenage BrainWhy adolescence is a brain rebuild, not a malfunction.