Translation Results Requested Through Conyac Made Public

From a parent's point of view, the most important and exciting thing about language acquisition is probably just that it allows their children to talk to them. But exactly what does it take to be able to talk? And how do children get from the point where they can't do it to the point where they can? Most children start producing words some time between the ages of eight and twelve months or so, and many children have ten words in their vocabulary by the age of fifteen months. Things gradually pick up speed from that point on. Whereas an eighteen-month-old child may learn only one or two new words a day, a four-year-old will pick up as many as twenty. (That's more than one per waking hour!) Every time I'm asked that question, my first inclination is to respond by simply saying that I wish I knew. In a way, that's the most honest answer that anyone can give. The fact of the matter is that we still don't understand how children learn language any more than we have figured out how the universe works or why we can't all live for two hundred years. But that doesn't mean that we are completely in the dark. On the contrary, research in the last three decades has yielded many exciting and important findings that reveal a great deal about how language is acquired.