VOCABULARY SPURT (also VOCABULARY BURST, VOCABULARY EXPLOSION)
A sudden rapid increase in the vocabulary produced by a child, which usually begins during the second half of the second year of life. At the time the spurt occurs, the child usually has a productive vocabulary of around 50 to 100 words; this may rise to as many as 350 to 500 over a relatively short period of time. While many of the new words are nouns, the spurt results in a much higher overall proportion of verbs and adjectives in the child’s vocabulary than before.
The precise cause of the spurt is unknown. One explanation is that the child has suddenly become aware that language functions as a symbolic system. This might take the form of a naming insight, where the child comes to fully appreciate the link between objects and the names attached to them. A second view links the spurt to developments in cognition, particularly in the child’s ability to categorise objects. A third finds an explanation in the development of the child’s articulatory skill, while a fourth suggests that there may be some kind of bottleneck which needs to be passed before referential vocabulary can expand. This last view has been supported by evidence from connectionist computer simulations of the learning of words, which have manifested a spurt like that observed in real life.
However, no theory entirely fits the data, and the concept of a vocabulary spurt remains somewhat controversial. One reason is that a sudden increase in vocabulary is not universal. In some infants, vocabulary develops in a series of short bursts; in some, the development is gradual and continuous. It has also proved difficult to pinpoint the moment at which, in a given child, the increase begins; this would seem to cast doubt upon the theory of a sudden insight into the nature of language. Finally, account has to be taken of the complex relationship between comprehension and production; it may be that many of the words that feature in the spurt have been ‘acquired’ much earlier and stored for future use.
See also: Learning style, Vocabulary acquisition
Further reading: Bates et al. (1995: 103–7); Bloom (2000: Chap. 2); Clark (2003: 81–8); Dromi (1999)
