Previously: Max's Vocabulary Acquisition, Clark's Vocabulary Acquisition

Bringing in the third data point in how fast my children grow their vocabulary, Ruby is up next. Let's graph!

Only 13% of her vocab was in Chinese. I haven't been doing as good a job instilling the Chinese vocabulary as I had with Max (25%) and Clark (26%). Part of that is that Ruby hasn't ever been in a Chinese daycare, so it's mostly just me, and I'm not so consistent. I notice her understanding is fine, but her willingness to speak Chinese is less. Still not sure if she recognizes that there are two distinct languages.

Compared to Clark, she started talking at a similar age (12 months) and knows 79% as many words as he did (680) at this age:

For the eldest sibling, Max, I didn't track over the same time range, but from 108 words at 18 months to 1000 words at 24 months, Max picked up vocabulary much more quickly. In comparison, at 24 months, Ruby had 326 words.

The composition of which words each kid learned more of surprised me. Max learned mostly objects (17% of his vocabulary), followed by verbs (13%), then food (10%), then animals (9%). Clark focused much more on verbs (17%), followed by objects (10%), people (9%), and adjectives (9%). Ruby was closer to Max, mostly learning objects (15%), food (13%), verbs (11%), and animals (8%). Food makes sense, as she's very food-oriented, but I'm surprised that Clark had the most people and that Ruby had relatively few (6%). Ruby took a little longer to learn her letters (23 months) than Max (21 months for most, but he didn't learn them all until after 24) and Clark (19 months and he started reading soon thereafter). Same for her numbers (23 months) compared to Max (before 18 months) and Clark (20 months).

How much of this is Ruby's innate predisposition to vocabulary learning versus her different environment is hard to say. For Max and Clark, now 8 and 6, it's easy to see that Max is more talkative and expressive, so that verbal vocabulary trait has persisted over time. But Clark learned reading earlier (early 2yo vs. Max's late 2yo) and reads faster, so it hasn't generalized even into that adjacent domain. Ultimately, the vocabulary acquisition analysis is just for fun; I don't anticipate it to have much predictive power over later traits.

Of the words she learned that her brothers didn't, some of my favorites are noodle, Totoro, screw, 蛇 (snake), maze, sunshine, Godzilla, waterfall, stujpid, crush, hydrogen, 哎哟 (ouch), hexagon, dance, burn, ninja, yoga, goddess, and unicorn. Also, I love that her first word was "Dad".

If you want to see the full words, play around with the data, or do a similar vocabulary tracking project of your own, here's the spreadsheet: Max, Clark, and Ruby's Vocabulary Words