100 word vocabulary

Fabio Capello's claim that he only needs 100 words of English to communicate with his England footballers has sparked lots of silly (but fun) discussions about what those words might be. The BBC covered it here, The Guardian reckoned that beaten excuse quarter final, Germany, jagerbomb, lager and WAGs might be in there, while today's G2 extends the 100 words to other occupations including taxi drivers (Where left right lights immigration stop roadworks traffic not being funny but come over here free council houses bloody liberty politicians all same)  and teachers (You sit quiet please everyone now enough gum tie shirt homework yes today excuses no book open page talking stop discipline noise courtesy while others trying learn). But why stop there? George Osborne would only need 3 words (cut, gloat and slime) so that would be easy, but what about other jobs and professions?

Thinking of those 100 words that are used most frequently, is there a way in which patterns in their grammar could be discerned? Katherine Nelson's study of children's first words back in 1973 showed that one year-olds tended to favour nouns heavily among their first 50 words, but what would the pattern be for you?

Wikipedia uses data from Oxford Dictionaries to assemble the 100 most frequently used words in English, but this data is drawn from written texts primarily, making it very different from what a person would say in a normal day of speaking.

Perhaps an interesting language investigation at A2 would be to record a few minutes of conversation every hour and log the words used, their frequency and word class, to establish the patterns in your own speech and that of others.

Early words

New research from the USA suggests that children's acquisition of vocabulary begins earlier than previously thought and relies more heavily on phonology (the sounds of a language) than expected. The report in Science Daily draws on research from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Daniel Swingley and suggests that children's comprehension of words starts at around 8 months, even though the average child will probably say his or her first word at about 12 months.

Infants have a unique ability to discriminate speech-sound (phonetic) differences, but over time they lose this skill for differentiating sounds in languages other than their native tongue. For example, 6 month old babies who were learning English were able to distinguish between similar-sounding Hindi consonants not found in English, but they lost this ability by 12 months of age. Since the 1980s it has been known that infants start focusing on their language’s consonants and vowels, sometimes to the exclusion of non-native sounds. More recently, researchers have increasingly focused on how infants handle whole words.

Recent research has shown that during infancy, babies learn not only individual speech sounds but also the auditory forms of words; that is, babies are not only aware of the pieces that make up a word, but they are aware of the entire word. These auditory forms of words allow children to increase their vocabulary and help them to eventually develop grammar. Although they may not know what the words mean, children as early as 8 months start learning the phonological (sound) forms of words and are able to recognize them—and just being familiar with the words helps increase the children’s vocabulary. Studies have shown that 18 month old children who are familiar with a word’s form are better at learning what it means and are also able to differentiate it from similar sounding words.

You'll be starting ENGA1 Language Development quite soon as part of your AQA A English Language AS (or will already have studied it as part of your ENA1 unit in AS last year), so keep an eye out for research into child language to help you understand the topic.

Useful for:
ENGA1 - Language Development