YOUNG children become chatterboxes within months of speaking just the occasional word. Now one scientist thinks he knows why.
Parents of small children will be familiar with the so-called “word spurt”, when a child goes from barely talking to suddenly uttering hundreds of new words, sometimes after hearing them only once. have been suggested to explain this phenomenon. For instance, perhaps learning a few basic words helps a child learn others, or maybe children quickly understand that if there is a word they don’t recognise, it belongs to the object they can’t name.
Now language psychologist Bob McMurray…
