Everyone knows that a child’s first words are usually “Mummy” and “Daddy”, but what else do we know about when words are learnt by children? Are there any patterns in the types of words they learn first?

A dataset collected by Pernille Hansen contains 732 Norwegian words (some duplicates were removed in the chart below) and the age of acquisition (in months) for each word. Notice the burst of new words around the age of two.

First words

The interactive version is easier to read: you can hover on words (this will show the original Norwegian word too) and zoom with the browser controls. You can also hover on the coloured dots in the legend to show only words in that category. This shows, for example, that sound effects are acquired well before descriptive words.

Visualization type: scatterplot

Data source: Kaggle, CSV, 58 KB

Technical notes: generated using d3; code

See also: Hansen (2016). What makes a word easy to acquire? The effects of word class, frequency, imageability and phonological neighbourhood density on lexical development. First Language. doi: 10.1177/0142 723716679956 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723716679956