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Are the babies simply memoriing the words or are they actually reading?
Answer: It is true that the babies initially memorise the shapes of the written
words, but over time they will figure out the patterns of the written language in
a way that is similar to how they figure out the patterns of the spoken language.
Toddlers learn to add an 'ed' to make words to make them past tense or an 's' onto
words to make them plural simply from listening to English. We know that they learn
these patterns because sometimes a toddler might say "I eated" or "I swimmed" even
if they have never heard these words. After the babies memorise enough written words,
the child begins to figure out the phonetic patterns of our language. The first
50 words that a child learns to read generally take a long time, but once they know
around 50 words they generally learn them at a faster pace.
The same is true with spoken language. Once a child understands around 50 words,
the child can remember many words after hearing them only once or twice. This is
why it is so important for parents to use many new words with toddlers. Reading
is great for this because there are more infrequently used words used in books compared
with a person's speech. It usually takes around a hundred written words or so before
the child begins to figure out the phonetic patterns. The child will need to learn
hundreds of individual words to figure out all of the phonetic patterns in English.
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