A main source for the ages
Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning: The Wordbank Project
Michael C. Frank, Mika Braginsky, Daniel Yurovsky, Virginia A. Marchman · 2021 · MIT Press
- Children
- About 82,000 word lists filled in by parents
- Where
- 29 languages, mostly from Europe and the United States
- Ages
- 8 to 30 months
- How
- Researchers pooled parents' word lists from many studies (the Wordbank collection)
- What it found
- Gives "around one year" as a rule of thumb for first words, and shows that children of the same age vary a lot in how many words they say.
- Limits
- Parents can miss words or count babble as words. Most children were from Europe and the United States and learning one language.