What does a child understand at 1-1.5 years old?

Mastering the native language is the second most important achievement for a child. Of course, a child at the end of the infancy period also understands a little of the speech of people around him, but this understanding is still too narrow and peculiar. A child's vocabulary grows faster after a year, when he, having learned to walk, encounters more and more objects.

Usually, a child at 12 months pronounces 3-5 words consisting of two syllables ("ma-ma", "ba-ba", etc.), and already at 18 months his vocabulary is about 20 words. Thus, great achievements are noted in the development of speech. From pronouncing sounds, exclamations, individual words, the child moves on to forming sentences of 2-3 and even several words. This is the birth of speech characteristic of the child - with original distortions and inventions, which gives him broader opportunities for self-expression and formulating questions.

In order to designate a particular object, in order to have "concepts", the child must understand them. The stage of exploration and "conquest" of the surrounding world significantly contributes to the development of speech. This is also facilitated by the constant, varied in form communication of the child with adults. For example, if you are dressing a child, then be sure to accompany your actions with a story about what you are doing now: "Now we will put on a shirt. Where is the shirt? Bring it to me. And now we will put on pants. Where are the pants? Bring them."

By doing such simple tasks, the child practices listening and understanding words and whole sentences. He begins to listen to words that denote objects and actions with them, and soon begins to understand what objects surround him. When you play with the child, show him the nose, eyes, cup, spoon, teach him to associate certain parts of the body or objects with certain sound combinations. This is the first step to truly understanding words. And the next time you ask the child: "What is this? And what is this?" and the child answers, albeit not quite correctly or distorting the words (for example, instead of "sugar" - says "kasal", or instead of "worm" - "chervyak"), then you should repeat the name of the object for him. This will consolidate the concept.

Most words in children under two years of age are nouns. Very often, a child uses the same word to denote different, albeit similar, objects. For example, the word "shapa" denotes a hat, a kerchief, and a cap - that is, everything that is put on the head, and the word "zhizha" denotes a burning match, fire, burning coals, hot water, etc., although in our understanding "zhizha" is something liquid.

Such words have a very vague meaning and denote all objects that have some common, sometimes completely random, feature. As experience accumulates, the child learns to distinguish objects and, consequently, begins to use words more correctly. For example, one girl at one year and nine months clearly distinguished a ball, a ping-pong ball, and a balloon, although only 2-3 months ago she called everything round a ball.

Gradually, children move from individual words to sentences. At first, these sentences consist of two (a little later - three words): "Mama. Kanaka" ("Mama, here's a pencil") or "Tol kaka!" ("The table is bad" - after hitting the corner of the table). Naturally, in order for a child to speak in sentences, his vocabulary should consist of 30-60 words.

Gradually, the phrases become longer, but are also composed of individual words that do not yet fully agree with each other: "Matsiy sneg bukh" ("The boy fell in the snow"); "Dai ta kitka" ("Give me that book"). And only by the end of the second year, the child begins to change words, in particular nouns, according to cases.

Thus, from one to two years, the child's vocabulary quickly expands. And although this sharp increase in the number of spoken words varies significantly among different children, on average this growth is evident. Thus, if by the end of the first year the number of understood words was about 30, and the number of spoken words was one, then over the next 7-8 months the number of spoken words increases to an average of 250.

Another peculiarity in the formation of concepts in children is that they remember the name of some object (for example, a cup) and believe that only this particular object is called that. All the others, although similar, are called differently. (Tanechka (1 year 2 months) knew her cup well - green with white spots. She did not identify all the other cups with the name "cup". And only later, when she had learned this word, did she learn to combine all the cups into one group.)

In this way, the child learns to combine objects into categories and groups. He learns to identify the main features of an object (the shape of a cup, a handle) and is distracted from such insignificant differences as color, size, pattern or design.

Speech acquisition is important not only for the child's mental development. Speech acquisition also plays a huge role in the formation of the first moral assessments. Already at this age, the child develops an attitude towards good and bad, towards the beautiful and the ugly. It is from these rudimentary attitudes that genuine moral feelings will be formed: "Ugh! What dirty hands you have! You need to wash them immediately"; "You can't eat candy before eating!" Children, encountering different attitudes of adults towards certain phenomena, begin to understand the words-assessments: "good" and "bad". Moreover, they learn both the intonation and the facial expressions that accompany this assessment.