Dockrell, JE; Messer, DJ; (2004) Lexical acquisition in the early school years. In: Berman, RA, (ed.) Language Development across Childhood and Adolescence. (pp. 35-52). John Benjamins: Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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Abstract

Children‟s first words mark the beginning of a lifelong lexical journey. During this journey they move from apprentice word learners to competent vocabulary users at a remarkable rate. The apparent ease of this process has led to the suggestion that “learning vocabulary is a relatively simple affair” (Plunkett and Wood, in press). However, we adopt a different stance, to argue that lexical acquisition is a complex and extended process involving the integration of phonological, semantic, and morpho-syntactic knowledge with cognitive and social processes. Vocabulary knowledge is a strong predictor of academic success, and it plays a central role in cognitive development especially in relation to literacy and learning (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1997; Stanovich and Cunningham, 1993). The lexicon provides a unique domain for studying the interaction between context and cognition, and the ways in which this interaction changes with development. We address these issues by considering the factors that are important in early lexical development (Section 1), examining the ways in which different assessment procedures provide contrasting views of children‟s abilities (Section 2), considering the support for vocabulary learning in school (Section 3) and the challenges of (Section 4) and the difficulties that occur in (Section 5) later vocabulary learning.

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