The Miracle of Literacy

11/02/2009

Without love, benevolence becomes egotism.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Learning to speak was the hardest thing you ever did, yet you had the job mastered by the time you were in kindergarten. How did you manage such a feat?" This is the question that opens the article, "Language and the Baby Brain," in the book, Your Brain: A User's Guide (New York: Time Books, 2009). It goes on to lay out the numbers...

"...We start life nonlingual. Within 18 months, we have a core working vocabulary of 50 words we can pronounce and 100 or some more we understand. By the time we are 3, we have about 1,000 words at our command and are constructing often elaborate sentences. By our sixth birthday, our vocabulary has exploded to 6.000 words — meaning that we've learned, on average, three new words every day since birth. Mastering good conversational English requires about 50,000 words...".

The article goes on to indicate that each neuron in a baby's brain can make 15,000 connections, whereas in adults, our capacity is only 10,000 connections. The article observes that it is "this extra wiring that enables a baby's brain to learn languages so easily."

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