Children Learn Words BBS 2000

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        10:00 AM, September 13, 2007
      
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        PAUL BLOOM
      
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        The average English-speaking 17-year-old knows more than 
      
      
        <b>60,000 words</b>
      
      
        . Since children start learning their first words by about their first birthday, this 
        comes to over
      
      
        <b> ten new words per day</b>
      
      
        . These can be acquired without any training or feedback; children can grasp much of a 
        word?s meaning after hearing it in the course of a passing conversation. Deaf and blind 
        children learn words, as do those who are neglected and abused. In some cultures, parents 
        make no efforts to teach their children to talk, but these children nonetheless also learn 
        words. There is nothing else ? not a computer simulation, and not a trained chimpanzee ? 
        that has close to the word learning abilities of a normal 2-year-old child.
      
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        <b>Here is how they do it</b>
      
      
        : Young children can parse adult speech (or sign) into 
      
      
        <b>distinct words</b>
      
      
        . 
      
      
        <b>They think of the world as containing entities, properties, events, and processes; most 
        important, they see the world as containing </b>
      
      
        <i><b>objects</b></i>
      
      
        . They know enough about the minds of others to figure out what they are intending to 
        refer to when they use words. They can generalize; and so when they learn that an object 
        is called "bottle" and an action is called "drinking", they can extend the words to 
        different objects and actions. They can also make sense of pronouns and proper names, 
        which refer to distinct individuals, not to categories; and so they understand that "Fido" 
        refers to a particular dog, not to dogs in general. 
      
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Children Learn Words BBS 2000

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