Does your child find some words much harder to learn? Well, there's a good reason.It’s because they’re starting to use more complicated words.Words like ‘green’,‘happy’ and ‘jump’. These are words for more complicated things like actions (jump),features (green) and feelings (happy).And so they’re much harder to learn than ‘naming words’,which stand for things you can touch, like ‘cat’, ‘ball’ and ‘lorry’.
Luckily your child is super clever and will use the language they do understand to learn the words they don’t understand.And we know all this because of some very clever science.Language is full of patterns. For instance, lots of describing words end in ‘ey’, like‘ bendy’, ‘furry’, ‘smelly’. So researchers used some pretend-words to show how children use these patterns to guess what words mean. They showed some children a green furry square and said 'this is a wuggy one'. They then showed them a set of toys including a green furry circle and a smooth blue square; and asked them to choose another wuggy toy.
The children would reliably choose the green furry circle. Why?Because they’d worked out that the 'ey' in the pretend word ‘wuggy’ makes it a describing word, a word like furry, rather than a naming word, like square! Sounds complicated but all it really means is that you can help your child learn these harder words by showing them different objects that have the same features. So, here’s a furry rabbit and here’s a furry cat, or Mum’s running and the cat’s running. See, simple!
Does your child find some words harder to learn?
It could have something to do with the types of things that these words describe.
Image caption, Does your child find some words much harder to learn? It could be because they’re starting to use words for more complicated things like actions, features and feelings.
1 of 4
