NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION



1.2 The problem

Words can be seen as the basic building blocks of language. The typical two-year-old
child uses between 50 and 600 words (Bates et al, 1982) and adds an average of ten words
per day to his/her vocabulary, resulting in a vocabulary of approximately 14,000 words
by the age of six years (Templin, 1957; Carey, 1978). Once children enter school, they are
exposed to 10.000 or more new words each year, and annually add 3,000 or so of these
words to their vocabulary (Nagy and Anderson, 1984; Nagy and Herman, 1987). By the
time an individual has graduated from high school, she/he is likely to know more than
50.000 words. The acquisition of words will not end during an individual’s lifetime, so
that an adult may easily have a vocabulary in excess of 100,000 words.

Vocabulary acquisition is an important factor for language development and later
literacy skills. Higher level linguistic abilities such as language production and
comprehension, reading and writing are unable to proceed adequately if a child has a poor
knowledge of the meanings and sounds of individual words (Feitelson, Kita, & Goldstein,
1986).

The vocabulary growth occurring in school children is substantial and significant, and has
received attention from a number of researchers (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982;
Graves, 1986). According to Wells (1986) vocabulary size is strongly correlated with
children's overall school achievement. Because vocabulary plays an important role in both
communication effectiveness and academic success, is important to understand how
young children achieve their vocabulary growth.

In the early school years vocabulary is acquired incidentally in normal contexts such as
story reading and oral lessons (Elley, 1989; Nagy, Anderson & Herman, 1987). However,
a minority of researchers have examined how preschool age children acquire new
lexical items through having stories read to them and which are the factors that influence
the word learning process.

Those researchers claim that preschool age children Ieam new vocabulary through
listening to stories. However, they come to that conclusion by measuring lexical
acquisition through a single test such as the multiple choice test and without exploring

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