Acquiring a Single New Word

By the time a child has learned a new word, he or she has gained many distinct kinds of information. To take a hypothetical example, consider the word "wolf" being learned by a child who already has a modest animal vocabulary. She must make a new lexical entry: she must note that "wolf" is an English word. She must learn its syntactic subcategorization, namely that it is a common noun. She must relate it to other English words, to its supernyms (such as "animal") and hyponyms (such as "Siberian wolf") and other words in the same lexical domain. She must also learn what "wolf" refers to_ And she must restructure the conceptual domain of animals, at least with respect to how they are named. Suppose, for example, that wolves were previously called "dog." Then learning a new word may be the occasion for learning a new concept, for differentiating dogs from wolves. At the very least, it is the occasion for learning that wolves have a different name from dogs. Clearly, then, learning even a single new word involves learning a great deal of information. In the past, word learning has been studied in several different ways-there have been vocabulary counts, diary studies, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of the acquisition of organized lexical domains such as size, color or quantity. But in all of these paradigms, there is no control over the input to the child. It is not known how much exposure he or she has had to any given word, nor in what contexts. Thus, while much can be learned about word learning from these procedures, they are not ideal for achieving an understanding of the process itself. Surprisingly, the obvious technique of teaching children an unknown word has been little used (see Carey, 1978 for a review). None of these was designed to mimic the circumstances in which children naturally encounter new words and none was designed to probe for partial acquisition along the way. The present study is an attempt to fill this gap. The experimental procedures that we ultimately designed were intended to provide a strong test of the child's word learning skills. For us, that meant several things. First, we wanted to present the new word in a situation that would approximate a child's everyday word-learning experience at its most casual and undirected level. This meant using a situation in which there was not …