How daily life supports your toddler’s language development

Have you ever felt the pressure to sit down and teach your toddler some new words? We hope not! If you have, read on to find out why simply chatting with them as you get on with everyday life is great for their language learning (and you don’t need to talk all the time – pauses and time to think are great too).   

What are you talking about?  

Your toddler learns the meaning of words from listening and watching how they are used by people around them.  

At first, this happens when you talk about something your toddler can see – that's why they often learn the names of people and objects first.  

Sometimes, your toddler might need to hear a word many times in different sentences to understand it. For example, to understand that blue refers to a colour, they need to hear it several times in context. 

“Oh look, you’re wearing your blue top.” “There goes a blue car.” “I love the blue flower.” 

Assuming they understand the words ‘top’, ‘car’ and ‘flower’, your toddler will gradually realise that the word blue refers to the colour of these objects.  

This explains why learning colours and other adjectives takes a long time – and lots of experience of these words being used.  

Categories and social understanding help with word learning 

Your toddler uses categories to understand the world, and these help them as they learn new words.  

They can link an initial meaning to a word they hear based on what they know – so they have a category of animals and a few words associated with this category.  

This is why your toddler might overextend and call all small animals with four legs ‘cats’ – they change this when they hear you use the correct word (maybe several times).  

Your toddler’s social understanding also helps them learn words. They look to see what you are looking at as you speak – so they can work out what you’re talking about.  

And as their social understanding develops, they will know the kinds of things people talk about in familiar situations. This knowledge will help them understand more of what’s being said.  

All of this makes daily routines great places for learning vocabulary 

The things you do with your toddler every day (or regularly) are ideal for language learning. They will be familiar with how you do things and can predict what might happen next.  

When they hear a new word in a familiar routine, they will notice it and because they know what happens, they can think about what that new word means.  

And even better, you probably don’t need to change what you do at all – simply enjoy the fact that chatting as you do everyday things is a wonderful way to support your toddler’s understanding and speech development.  

Reference: 

Clark, E.V. (2016). Language in Children. Taylor & Francis.