First words: modeling

Since my last post was on getting a child to talk i thought would continue in this genre...

A lot of parents ask me about first words.

Most typically developing children should have at least one word by the age of 1. (a word is defined as the same verbal output, without hearing you say it first, in the same context in more than one instance--"ba" for "ball").

How do you get a child's vocabulary to grow past the first word?

Model! lots of modeling.

I suggest watching your child to see what he/she is interested then talk about what the child is doing. That way you are using language to describe the activity he/she is focused on and he/she is more likely to be listening and applying those labels appropriately.

Try not to use the phrase "say _____". It's so hard. But if you want a child to label "doll", for instance, don't use "say 'doll'". Instead talk about the 'doll'...try to use the word 5 to 10 times in that interaction.

For example: "A doll. She is a pretty doll. The doll has brown hair. Hi, doll. Doll."
Notice i also started with a short utterance (2 words), built it up adding more and more information and then broke it down back to 1 word.

I recently went to a speech therapy lecture on using music to expand children's vocabulary. If a child should hear a word 5 to 10 times in one situation, imagine how many times they would hear a word repeating in music.

For example: "yeah" in the song, "She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah. She loves me, yeah yeah yeah."

One last point for this post...what you should model.

If a child uses an approximation for a word, don't use that approximation as your model. You should continue to use the target word.

For example: The child says "juju" for "juice". You should not say "Would you like your juju?". You should still ask "Would you like your juice?"