No, the answer is not: “Five: a, e, i, o u.” Granted, in traditional English spelling those are the vowel letters, yes, but I’m talking about our spoken language: How many significant vowel sounds are there? Well, if you consult any popular American English dictionary, and study the Pronunciation Key, there will be a long list of vowels. In the Pronunciation Key to the American Heritage Dictionary, 19 different vowel symbols are listed (not counting the ones only used in foreign words)! However, some of these are special vowels that only occur before the /r/ sound, which are “colored” by the /r/, so these can be separated out as special cases. And one of these vowels, /ə/, only occurs in weak syllables (completely unstressed syllables), never in stressed syllables, so it also can be separated out as a special case. This leaves us with 15 vowels that can occur in stressed syllables. Very few North American English speakers have all of these vowels: Many have 14 (lacking the /ä/ vowel), and many have only 13 (lacking both /ä/ and /ô/). New York City has 16 vowels, the 15 in the American Heritage list plus one that is not usually listed in dictionary pronunciation guides, which I have chosen to spell /ăə/!

To lay is to place something or put something down, and it must be followed by a noun or pronoun, a thing; to lie is to recline. A lie is an untruth, and to lie also means "to tell an untruth." Examples: Lay that package on the mantel, will you please? Bridgette would like to lie in the hammock near the pool. Sometimes it's tempting to lie when you're in trouble, but a lie only makes things worse. (Hint:Lay sounds like place; lie sounds like recline. But be careful: lay is also the past tense of the verb to lie: Jay lay on the couch all day yesterday.)

A brake is the device that stops a vehicle; to break is to separate or destroy; and the noun break is a timed stoppage, as in "take a break." Examples: You could break your bones if the brakes on your car or bike don't work!

A chord is the combination of two or more tones sounded at the same time; acord is a rope or string, or an insulated electric wire fitted with a plug to use as a conduit. Examples: The dissonant chord sung by the choir sounded like a cat screeching! The computer lab has a mass of cords crawling from the computers to the walls.

Continual means "repeated regularly and often;" continuous means "extended or prolonged without interruption." Examples: Julia hated the continual negative political ads. The alarm bell was jammed and rang continuously; it never stopped and was making Gayle loony!

A cue is a clue or hint or a subtle pointing out of something; it's also a long, tapered stick used in playing billiards or pool; a queue (a term used mainly in Britain) is a file or line, especially of people awaiting their turn; it also is a braid of hair worn hanging down the back. Examples: Take a cue from Jeff; he's an accomplished pool player and often chalks his cue. Allison had a long braid of hair that draped down her back, and when she stood in line we joked that she was a girl with a queue in a queue!

Eminent means "distinguished or superior"; imminent means "impending, sure to happen." Also, eminent domain is the right of a government to take over private property for public use. Examples: The rain was imminent; it would arrive soon, soaking the eminent dignitaries on the stage. (Think of imminent andimpending, which both begin with the same letters.)

Stationary means "fixed in place, unable to move;" stationery is letterhead or other special writing paper. (Hint: Stationery with an e comes with an envelope.) Examples: Evan worked out on his stationary bike. The duke's initials and crest appeared atop his personal stationery.

Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer words to them overall. Parents who talk more inevitably expose their children to a greater variety of words and sentences, so a correlation also turned up between the diversity of parents' language—the number of different nouns and adjectives they used, and the length of their phrases and sentences—and their children's linguistic progress.

In addition to these quantitative features, Hart and Risley discovered a particular qualitative aspect of parental language that seems to especially influence children's language: the amount of positive versus negative feedback children hear. Youngsters who heard a larger proportion of no, don't, stop it, and similar prohibitions had poorer language skills than three-yearolds who had received less negative feedback. Of course, no parent of toddler-aged children can avoid all prohibitions, but those who kept their negative responses to a minimum, emphasizing instead positive responses, such as repeating their children's vocalizations or following them with ques¬ tions or affirmations, fostered better language development.

A follow-up study on the same group of children reveals that these differences in verbal skills persisted well into the grade-school years; by third grade, children whose parents spoke more to them during the first three years continued to excel at various language skills, including reading, spelling, speaking, and listening abilities. So even after children enter school, when their parents cease to be the sole influence over their cognitive development. their early language exposure has created a lasting legacy in their language achievement.

There is another, very disturbing side to Hart and Risley's report. In selecting the forty families tor their study, they deliberately chose a crosssection of American socioeconomic classes. When the researchers factored in these differences, it became blatantly clear that virtually every feature of parenting style improved substantially as families ascended the ladder of educational and financial advantage. Even something as simple as the number of words addressed to young children tended to increase dramatically, with chi dren on welfare hearing an average of 600 words per hour addressed to them, as compared with 1,200 for children of working-class families and 2,100 for children with professional parents. Socioeconomic level also correlated strongly with the type of feedback parents tended to give their children. On average, professional parents were heard to praise or otherwise respond positively to their children seven times more often than welfare parents, and they doled out negative feedback—those particularly toxic prohibitions and imperatives—only half as frequently. With such enormous differences in both the quantity and quality of interaction with their parents, it's not hard to see how children from different socioeconomic groups are propelled onto wildly different trajectories of language-learning.

The social and political implications of these findings are staggering. Obviously, it would take a massive effort to overcome these extreme differ¬ ences in children's early language experience. But it's important to realize that socioeconomic class per se is not the primary factor determining chil¬ dren's language achievement. For while children's fate may seem to be sealed by their level of economic advantage, what really matters is their parents' style of interacting with them. In other words, if we look just within a single socioeconomic group, like the twenty-three families that made up the "working-class" rank in Hart and Risley's study, parenting style turns out to be a much better predictor of each child's language skills than the parents' precise financial and educational attainment. Within this group, parents who talked more to their children, who used a greater variety of words and sentences, who asked rather than told their children what to do, and who consistently responded in positive rather than negative ways to their chil¬ dren's speech and behavior, tended to raise more verbally gifted children than those who were poorer at these parenting skills. Similar findings have been reported in a study of professional-class children in Chicago: those whose mothers addressed more words to them in the second year of life had the fastest-growing vocabularies, ou even m higher socioeconomic ranks, there is enough variety in parenting styles to significantly affect the quality of children's language development, exploding, as some call it, "the myth of the educated parent."

First of all, language stimulation should begin very early: by just three years of age, children are already headed down vastly different paths of verbal achievement as a result of their cumulative experience with language. Ideally, language stimulation should begin at birth, since we know that newborns' brains are already attuned to human speech and immediately start learning the sounds of their mother tongue. In fact. Fowler's group found that babies who entered their program between six and eight months of age were not as successful as those who began at the earliest age, three months, so clearly earlier is better.

Secondly, the quantity of language is critical: the more words a child hears, the larger her vocabulary will be, and the faster it will continue to grow. But it cannot be overemphasized that this quantity means the number of words addressed to the child. Mothers aren't doing their kids any favors by talking on the phone all day; day-care workers don't help by conversing only with other workers; nor is television an adequate way to increase young children's language exposure. (Indeed, at one point deaf parents were advised to leave the TV on for their hearing babies, but it never succeeded in teaching them spoken language.) A baby can begin to make sense of language only when it refers to something she can directly relate to. Parents and other caregivers should thus talk frequently to their babies and try, whenever possible, to focus on the here and now: pointing out and labeling the objects, people. and events in their immediate environment, especially the babies' own actions, feelings, and attempts at speech.

Which brings us to the quality of language to which a child is exposed. Language addressed to young children needs to be simple, clear, and positive in tone in order to be of maximum value. Fortunately, most caregivers already use a special style when speaking to infants and young children. As noted in Chapter lo, babies clearly prefer the higher pitch, highly intonated style, and slower pace of "motherese," and recent evidence suggests that it even helps them in the earliest stages of phoneme-learning. But it's important to avoid the kind of muddled baby-talk that tums a sentence like "Is she the cutest lit¬ tie baby in the world?" into "Uz see da cooest wiwo baby inna wowud?" Care¬ givers should try to enunciate clearly when speaking to babies and young children, giving them the cleanest, simplest model of speech possible.

Of course, it's easy to say that speech should be at a level your child can understand, but it's not always easy to figure out what that level is. For instance, older babies understand much more than they can say, so you need not limit your speech to single syllables or words. On the other hand, there's evidence that even Sesame Street does more harm than good for children under eighteen months, probably because it comes at the expense of more direct, positive parental interaction. (But it is great for preschoolers.) At every age, parents need to seek out that happy medium of speaking to their child in a way that is largely within his reach of understanding but also stretches him just a bit beyond it.

Babies first bridge the gap between sounds and meaning as early as nine or ten months of age. They learn the names of family members and pets, the meaning of no! and perhaps a few general labels like shoe and cookie. By his first birthday, the average child understands around seventy words, mostly nouns like people's names and terms for objects, but also certain social expressions, like hi and bye-bye. Of course, he cannot say nearly that many. The median number of words spoken by a one-year-old is six, but many say none at all, and a few speak up to fifty. There's typically about a five-month lag between the time a toddler can understand a certain number of words and when he can actually speak that many.

New words accrue slowly between twelve and eighteen months. Nathan picks up a few nouns and expressions each month—spoon, blankie, nose, milk, up, allgone—trying each out for several days and often dropping them as he moves on to the next. But then, all of a sudden, his vocabulary hits critical mass: he starts saying new words every single day—car, cup, kitty, flower, plane, birdie, teeth, keys, hair, light, foot, let's go, ball, kiss, cracker, doggie, peekaboo, book, dance, water. Gramma, down, night-night, bath-time, eyes, ears. block, phone, bunny, hug, (com)puter, chair, tree, crib ... so many his mother can't keep up with the log she had begun keeping. Fifty is the magic number. Most toddlers' vocabulary explodes once they can say about four dozen words. Now they start adding one, two, or three new words to their speech every day, and their receptive vocabulary—the number of words a child understands—grows even more quickly. Between two and six, children are estimated to learn the meaning of a staggering eight words a day. That comes out to more than one new word every two hours they're awake, and they continue at this rate into the elementary school years. By the time a child is six, it's been estimated that he understands some 13,000 words, although he doesn't speak nearly that many.

[...]

There are really just two basic tricks of grammar used by all the languages of the world. You can create meaning either by adjusting the order of words or by changing the little pieces (known as inflections) that are tacked onto the ends of words (or beginnings, in some languages). For instance, the difference between "Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster" and "Cookie Monster i tickling Big Bird" is conveyed both by the sequence of words—which proper noun is on which side of the verb—and by the form of the verb, since changing "tickling" to "tickled by" would exactly reverse the meaning of each sentence.

Toddlers begin to appreciate differences in word order before they begin combining words in their own speech. When sixteen-to-eighteen-month-olds were seated in front of a pair of television sets, each showing Sesame Street puppets acting out one of these two sentences, they looked more at the video corresponding to whichever sentence was playing on voice-over. Children thus appreciate the meaning embedded in word order at a very young age, an understanding that becomes quite useful when they begin speaking two-word phrases themselves, usually between eighteen and twenty-four months. Indeed, the vast majority of toddlers' first word pairs are in the proper order, minisentences such as: All dry. I shut. See baby. More cereal. Mail come. Our car.

There is no three-word stage in language development. Toddlers hang for several months in the two-word phase, still rapidly building their vocabularies. Then, beginning early in the third year, they swim into another linguistic vortex, this time the rapid accumulation of grammatical skills. It begins, of course, with the stringing together of more and more words, but the number can be three, four, or even more: J drive car-car. Plane go fast. That big dog^e nice. Now go outside. What the man doing on roof? Though correct in word order, these early sentences tend to lack most of the inflections and little function words—of, to, the, am, do, in, etc.—which is why they are called telegraphic, as if each word were at a premium. Before long, however, two-year-olds start adding little bits of grammar, and this too happens in a strikingly predictable way. English-learning children usually begin with the present participle {-mg) verb ending, as in, Where Mommy going! Then come prepositions such as in and on, followed by plural -s endings (cats), possessive -s endings (hers), articles (the, a), regular past tense endings {-ed), and third person present tense -s endings (walks), to mention just a few.

What's most fascinating about the way children learn grammar is that they are not simply doing it by trial and error; they are figuring out the actual rules for how different classes of words are combined. This means, first of all, that they intuitively grasp the distinctions between different parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. Before long, they figure out how to adjust and assemble these various parts to produce the precise meaning they intend. Say, for instance, that four-year-old Daniel is presented with a word he has never seen before: someone shows him a drawing of a birdlike animal and tells him that it is a "wug." If he is next shown a drawing of two such creatures and asked what they are called, Daniel will inevitably say "wugs." He already knows, without ever being taught, how to recognize a noun and make it plural. In fact, there are three different situations in which English grammar requires the use of -s endings, and children master all of them before the age of four, but in a distinct sequence: first, they figure out how to make plurals (dogs, cats, Elmo dolls); then, to use -s to indicate possession (dog's bone. Fluffy s yam, Elmo's doll); and last, to make present tense verbs to agree with a third person singular subject (The dog barks. Fluffy plays with yam. Elmo pees!). That children start adding these different -s's at different times proves that they can distinguish these separate parts of speech and the rules that apply to them; they are not simply imitating individual words or phrases from Mommy and Daddy.

Even more revealing are the mistakes young children make. Though parents may bristle at the sound of them, there's a good reason why older twos. threes, and fours come up with constructions such as: He gots a purple truck; She beed happy; Katie comed over; We swimmed at the pool. Each error is one of overgeneralization; the child takes an irregular verb—one of the roughly i8o in the English language whose past tense is not formed simply by adding -ed to the end—and tries to treat it like a regular verb. Children persist in these mistakes for several years, but the amazing thing is that they tend not to appear in the speech of very young children. In other words, young toddlers will often get a few of these irregular verbs right—like came, was, or has—before they figure out that a rule exists and begin substituting comed, beed, and gots. These errors continue, in spite of adults' correction, until children finally manage to memorize, one by one, all the irregular verb past tenses and override the more convenient rule for regular verbs. Irregular plurals and comparators are a similar source of confusion, which is why you may hear a preschooler describe a trip to the circus thus: The goodest part was those mans with the funny feets!