ABSTRACT
On the face of it, acquiring a language is an easy thing to do. After all, it does not take long before newborn children start to utter the sounds of their native language and, some months later, their first words. Yet linguistic competence requires the mastery of an extremely complex linguistic system which appeals to many sub-skills that all exploit a large database of knowledge. Tens of speech sounds and thousands of words must be learned, as well as phonological and grammatical constraints on combining and ordering them in words and sentences and, ultimately, ways of organizing sentences in coherent discourse. Word learning on its own is already a multifaceted process, involving the learning of the words’ phonological forms (that is, their sound patterns), the awareness that these forms carry meaning, the linking of the sound patterns to meaning, and the understanding that words generally refer to whole classes of objects, people,
and events rather than to individual entities and that they can do so even under circumstances in which the words’ referents are not actually present in the environment.
