Learning and integration of new word-forms: Consolidation, pruning, and the emergence of automaticity

Learning a new word appears simple. One must learn the phonological form of the word (the word-form), the concept to which it refers, and an association between them. However, individually these are not trivial problems. Most concepts require integrating multiple perceptual and semantic features. Similarly, determining a novel word’s referent is challenging since a novel word could refer to anything present or implied in the discourse context, its properties, or the speakers’ intentions.