ABSTRACT

How do infants break the word learning barrier and learn their first words? How (if at all) do their word learning strategies change with development? The answer to these questions begins with the study of the youngest word learners in the last trimester of the 1st year of life. It has, however, proven very difficult to devise methods that can reliably assess early word learning in a controlled setting with such young children. This chapter addresses these questions and attempts to make progress along these fronts. First, we introduce a set of six principles that Golinkoff, Mervis, and Hirsh-Pasek (1994) posited to account for word learning in the developmental lexical principles framework. Second, we offer a thumbnail comparison of alternative theoretical approaches. Third, and finally, we present a new method, the Interactive Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Rehill, Wiley, & Brand, 1997; Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, in press) that permits us to study early word learning in a new way. To illustrate our theoretical approach and the new paradigm, results from experiments on the origins of the principle of reference (Golinkoff et al., 1994) are described. Before beginning, however, we ask the reader to suspend belief and to identify with the following example.