## Metadata - Author: [[William O'Grady]] - Full Title: How Children Learn Language - Category: #books ## Highlights - By age six, children have a vocabulary of about 14,000 words,9 and they go on to learn as many as twenty new words per day over the next several years.10 (Try to do that day in and day out if you’re learning a foreign language.) The average high school graduate knows 60,000 words.11 ([Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AP32LS&location=216)) - parents often ask more what questions than who questions, since there are usually more unfamiliar objects than unfamiliar people in the child’s environment to ask questions about. ([Location 2168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AP32LS&location=2168)) - Not all direct object questions are hard, though. Children have little or no trouble with questions such as What is the monkey drinking?, for example. That’s because they can use and interpret such sentences without paying close attention to the word order. Given the meaning of drink, what has to be the direct object and monkey has to be the subject – the reverse wouldn’t make sense. ([Location 2210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001AP32LS&location=2210))