NVESTIGATING LEXICAL ACQUISITION PATTERNS: CONTEXT AND COGNITION

language development such as acquisition of sounds, bound morphemes, syntax, manner
that speakers of a language use to communicate. The unique characteristic of word’s
meaning development is that much of it occurs after other aspects of language
development are more or less completed.

Kuczaj (1997) claims that the child needs to reach certain “knowledge sets” in order to
acquire a word. Those sets could be summarised as follows: (a) Recognition of the word
as a unit; (b) Identification of what is in a word’s meaning; (c ) Representation of a word’s
meaning in the mental lexicon. Each of the three knowledge sets is discussed in detail
in the following sections.

2.2.1 Recognition of the word as unit

In the early periods of developing word meaning, the child may hear words used as single
units, when for example a mother points to an animal and says dog. Tomasello and Farrar,
(1986) found that the use of object names by mothers to refer to objects which are already
in the child’s focus of attention is positively correlated with later vocabulary size. Later
on, children may be exposed to words as individual units at school, for example, when a
teacher presents and defines terms such cell, nucleus etc. There are also other situations,
for instance, when children read, they encounter words as isolated units on a page showing
an image and labelling the part of a cell.

However, in situations like normal speech, words are part of the speech stream, and
therefore must be separated. For the adults that seems an effortless process. Young
children are first faced with the task of separating the spoken speech stream into words
when they have little knowledge of their native language. It is difficult to explain how
children extract individual words from the speech stream, but is assumed that they do,
otherwise they could not learn so many words so quickly (Kuczaj, 1990). Probably they
are helped in that task by their willingness to listen to human speech. Gibson and Spelke
(1983) found that human infants prefer to listen to human speech rather than to other
sounds in their environment. Nonetheless, the infant’s preference for human sounds over
other sounds does not explain the process by which children are able to segment the
speech stream in the early phases of language development.

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