ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief explanation of several aspects of vocabulary and key issues regarding lexical knowledge, use, and acquisition, and presents an overview of research carried out to date on the lexicon of Spanish heritage language (SHL) speakers. Several studies about SHL learners' receptive vocabulary knowledge were conducted using a lexical decision task, a two-choice procedure in which a string of letters stimulus is presented and participants have to decide if it is a real word or not. The chapter offers some recommendations for practice and suggests a future research agenda. The chapter briefly discusses dialectal variation in the lexicon of US Hispanics. It describes some key studies regarding vocabulary among this population as it correlates with: age of acquisition (AoA), receptive knowledge, and productive knowledge. AoA is a construct that refers to the chronological age at which certain information is acquired by an individual.
