Synonyms
Definition
Vocabulary is the sum of all words that speakers can use in their speech (productive vocabulary) or comprehend when they are used by other speakers (receptive vocabulary).
Introduction
A child acquiring the lexicon of her language has two main tasks to master: (i) she has to isolate the words in a continuous speech stream and (ii) she has to map the words onto their meanings. First the research on how children segment the speech stream will be introduced, followed by a discussion of how children start assigning meanings to words.
Finding Words in Speech
It is almost impossible to recover word boundaries in fluent speech if one does not already know the words, as anyone who listened to a stretch of talk in an unfamiliar language will agree. But as all normally developing children eventually acquire the vocabulary of their language, it becomes worthwhile to ask how they set about finding words. Acquisition research has so far managed to...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2001). Children’s avoidance of lexical overlap: A pragmatic account. Developmental Psychology, 37(5), 630–641.
Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R. M., & Yuan, S. (2010). Syntactic bootstrapping. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(2), 143–149.
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, E. K., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: When speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 548–567.
Jusczyk, P. W., Friederici, A. D., Wessels, J. M. I., Svenkerud, V. Y., & Jusczyk, A. M. (1993). Infants’ sensitivity to the sound patterns of native language words. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 402–420.
Markman, E. M. (1991). The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings. In S. A. Gelman & J. P. Byrnes (Eds.), Perspectives on language and thought: Interrelations in development (pp. 72–106). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928.
Thiessen, E. D., & Saffran, J. R. (2003). When cues collide: Use of stress and statistical cues to word boundaries by 7-to-9-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 39(4), 706–716.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Yang, C. D. (2004). Universal grammar, statistics or both? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(10), 451–456.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Topaloğlu, S. (2017). Vocabulary. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2414-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2414-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences