Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition

Counterpoints is an international series and an important research and didactic tool for students, faculty, and practitioners. Conceived as an opportunity for in-depth dialogue and discussion on current topics of concern to researchers in psychology, education, child development, linguistics, and neuroscience, each volume consists of three or four extensive chapters by researchers representing key points of view on a particular topic. Language acquisition is a contentious field of research occupied by cognitive and developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and neuroscientists. Perhaps the key component to understanding how language is mastered is explaining word acquisition. At twelve months, infants learn new words slowly and laboriously but at twenty months they acquire an average of ten new words per day. How can we explain this phenomenal change? A theory of word acquisition will not only deepen our understanding of the nature of language, but will provide real insight into the workings of the developing mind. In the latest entry in Oxford's Counterpoints series, Roberta Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek present competing word acquisition theories that have emerged in the past decade. Each theory is presented by the pioneering researcher. Contributors include Lois Bloom of Columbia University, Linda Smith of Indiana University, Amanda Woodward of the University of Chicago, Nameera Akhtar of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute. An introductory chapter examines the concept of 'word'; a commentary on the other chapters by each author(s) evaluates the differences between these theoretical perspectives.