This text brings together investigations from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (with an emphasis on linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science) to examine how young children rapidly acquire the vocabulary of their native tongue, and with few errors along the way.

Without words, children can't talk about people, places, things, actions, relations, or states, and they have no grammatical rules. Without words, there would be no sound structure, no word structure, and no syntax. The lexicon is central in language, and in language acquisition. Eve Clark argues for this centrality and for the general principles of conventionality and contrast at the core of language acquisition. She looks at the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings, and how they map their meanings on to forms. The book is unusual in dealing with data from a wide variety of languages, in its emphasis on the general principles children rely on as they analyse complex word forms, and in the broad perspective it takes on lexical acquisition.

The contributors to this volume examine the multidimensional way in which infants and children acquire the lexicon of their native language.

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, University of Hildesheim, language: English, abstract: In order to understand how children acquire lexical meaning, this term paper focuses on the development of children’s mental lexicon and how children manage to store words in their mind. Everyday conversation requires most people to use several thousands of words in the course of an average day, while most of the time, people appear having relatively little difficulty in bringing the corresponding terms to their minds. Yet, speakers of a language are mostly unaware of the complex system allowing them to cope with these words and to use them appropriately. When learning a new language, however, adults are likely to reconsider their view on the human word-store, especially, when observing a three-year-old child using a for them difficult-to-learn language effortlessly. How is it possible that children acquire lexical meaning of thousands of words even before they are able to dress themselves properly? When thinking about the question, one might assume the learning of meaning of words as a simple task, imagining a word learning situation where the child is looking at a storybook while one of the parents is naming the depicted object by its respective name.

On-line information -- and free text in particular -- has emerged as a major, yet unexploited, resource available in raw form. Available, but not accessible. The lexicon provides the major key for enabling accessibility to on-line text. The expert contributors to this book explore the range of possibilities for the generation of extensive lexicons. In so doing, they investigate the use of existing on-line dictionaries and thesauri, and explain how lexicons can be acquired from the corpus -- the text under investigation -- itself. Leading researchers in four related fields offer the latest investigations: computational linguists cover the natural language processing aspect; statisticians point out the issues involved in the use of massive data; experts discuss the limitations of current technology; and lexicographers share their experience in the design of the traditional dictionaries.

This book is a valuable contribution to SLA research. Apart from the obvious target of the book, SLA researchers and teachers anywhere in the world, it will be of particular interest to the Japanese community and to Westerners interested in Japanese language and culture. It is not easy to write a book appealing to audiences as disparate as this, but Daulton has managed to do this very well. He writes clearly and lucidly and makes good use of his teaching experience in Japan (Hakan Ringbom, Abo Akademi University). Japan offers a prime example of lexical borrowing which relates to language transfer in second and foreign language learning. The insights gained by examining language borrowing in Japan can be applied wherever language contact has occurred and foreign languages are learned.Many of the most important English vocabulary may already exist in native lexicons. This pioneering book examines Japanese lexical borrowing, clarifies the effect of cognates on foreign language acquisition, assesses Japanese cognates that correspond to high-frequency and academic English, and discusses using this resource in teaching. It includes extensive lists of loanword cognates.

What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and widely recognized younger talent. It covers cutting edge and emerging areas of enquiry not treated elsewhere in a single handbook, including third language acquisition, electronic communication, incomplete first language acquisition, alphabetic literacy and SLA, affect and the brain, discourse and identity. Written to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced scholars of SLA, the Handbook is organised into six thematic sections, each with an editor-written introduction.

This book provides a critical review of recent theories of semantics-syntax correspondences and makes new proposals for constraints on semantic structure relevant to syntax. Data from several languages are presented which suggest that semantic structure in root morphemes is subject to parametric variation which has effect across a variety of verb classes, including locatives, unaccusatives, and psych verbs.The implications for first and second language acquisition are discussed. In particular, it is suggested that different parametric settings may lead to a learnability problem if adult learners do not retain access to sensitivity to underlying semantic organization and morphological differences between languages provided by Universal Grammar. An experiment with Chinese-speaking learners of English is presented which shows that learners initially transfer L1 semantic organization to the L2, but are able to retreat from overgeneralisations and achieve native-like grammars in this area. Suggestions for further research in this rapidly developing area of theory and acquisition research are also made.

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked. The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.

This volume does not offer a complex perspective of the L2 lexicon, but rather represents a sustained attempt to answer some very basic questions clustered around the relationship between the L2 mental lexicon and the L1 mental lexicon. It provides a review of L1 and L2 lexical research issues such as similarities and differences between the conditions of L1 and L2 acquisition, the respective roles of forming and meaning in L1 and L2 processing, and the degree of separation/integration between L1 and L2 lexical operations.