Word of the Week: Word Spurt

After toddlers learn about 50 words, often around 18 months of age, their vocabularies explode. This is called the word spurt or the vocabulary spurt. Toddlers learn words at double the rate that they were previously, or even faster. On average, children start off by learning 8-11 words per month. After about 50 words, this rate accelerates to an average 22-37 words per month.

The first words that children learn are mostly nouns. During the word spurt, children begin to add many verbs and adjectives to their vocabulary. This rapid increase of word acquisition can be attributed to toddlers beginning to understand more complex aspects of language, such as sentence structure. That is to say, once children have already learned the names for many things, they use those words to learn new ones more efficiently.