Word Learning

Children show the first signs of word recognition as young as six months and produce their first words at around a year. Word learning then proceeds rapidly, despite the complexity of determining what a word refers to, and the challenge of learning and using words in new contexts. How children solve this puzzle is the focus of some debate, and several mechanisms have been proposed, including innate strategies, simple associative learning, and sociopragmatic cues. Whichever account best explains early vocabulary development (and the story is unlikely to be that simple), word learning is affected by many varied factors including the language environment and characteristics intrinsic to the child, as well as nonlinguistic, often visual information. Novel paradigms offer new ways of understanding this fundamental component of early language acquisition, and emphasize that inputs to word learning are critically mediated by the interaction between the child’s body and the learning environment.