ABSTRACT

In this chapter the author presents some of his recent work on vocabulary development in young children. He considers Annette Karmiloff-Smith's contention, from her 1986 paper, From meta-process to conscious access, that progressive explicitisation and restructuring of mental representations are driven not by failure but by success. The author then considers how success in word learning in toddlers leads to a reorganisation of representations of both word meaning and word sounds. Recent statistical modelling estimates the average receptive vocabulary size of a typical 18-month-old at around 600 words. Forward semantic priming tasks with toddlers involve the auditory presentation of pairs of related or unrelated words immediately prior to the presentation of a pair of pictures. Phonological priming occurs in adults when a word influences the speed or accuracy of recognition of a similar-sounding word. Phono-lexical cohort effects in adults are commonly understood in terms of the influence of inhibitory connections between phonologically related words.