How many words do children know at different ages?

Question

I want to know if vocabulary acquisition varies from country to country, culture to culture. Are there standards for US school children? For example, does the Dept of Ed expect 6th graders to have a working vocabulary of 1000 words? I have looked at the US Dept of Ed and UNESCO homepages, but cannot find the info I'm looking for. Maybe I'm just not asking the right question ... Any suggestions about sources of info?

Answer 1

This is from http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/85-211b/language_acq.html

There are five basic stages of language acquisition:

1. Cooing: Appears at about 6 months or so. All infants coo using all the phonemes from every language. Even congenitally deaf children coo.
2. Babbling: Appears at around 9 months. Infants are starting to selectively use the phonemes from their native language.
3. One-word utterances: At around 12 months, children start using words.
4. Telegraphic speech: Children start making multi-word utterances that lack function words. (about 2 years old)
5. Normal speech: By about 5-6 years of age, children have almost normal speech

As far as actual numbers, look into what're called the "Dolch Words." Check here:

http://www.english-zone.com/reading/dolch.html

It says
# OF DOLCH WORDS RECOGNIZED

ESTIMATED READING LEVEL
0 - 75 Pre-primer
76 - 120 Primer
121 - 170 1st Year
171 - 210 2nd Year
Above 210 3rd Year +