Article September 11, 1902 Issue

A Child's Vocabulary

Exchange

It has been shown by actual count, by a professor at the University of Minnesota, that a two-year-old child may use in a day more than two thousand different words, repeating each of them, of course, from two or three times up to three hundred and fifty times, so that the total number spoken may reach ten thousand. The experimenter believes that a child's acquisition of words is governed partly by the law that the beneficial is generally pleasurable, and partly by habit. To a child, words are the means of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. The number of words in a child's vocabulary seems to have been greatly underestimated by previous observers. Exchange.

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