The Lexicon In Acquisition

Without words, children can't talk about people, places, things, actions, relations, or states, and they have no grammatical rules. Without words, there would be no sound structure, no word structure, and no syntax. The lexicon is central in language, and in language acquisition. Eve Clark argues for this centrality and for the general principles of conventionality and contrast at the core of language acquisition. She looks at the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings, and how they map their meanings on to forms. The book is unusual in dealing with data from a wide variety of languages, in its emphasis on the general principles children rely on as they analyse complex word forms, and in the broad perspective it takes on lexical acquisition.

This text brings together investigations from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (with an emphasis on linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science) to examine how young children rapidly acquire the vocabulary of their native tongue, and with few errors along the way.

The expert contributors to this book explore the range of possibilities for the generation of extensive lexicons. In so doing, they investigate the use of existing on-line dictionaries and thesauri, and explain how lexicons can be acquired from the corpus -- the text under investigation -- itself.

The contributors to this volume examine the multidimensional way in which infants and children acquire the lexicon of their native language.

This book is a valuable contribution to SLA research. Apart from the obvious target of the book, SLA researchers and teachers anywhere in the world, it will be of particular interest to the Japanese community and to Westerners interested in Japanese language and culture. It is not easy to write a book appealing to audiences as disparate as this, but Daulton has managed to do this very well. He writes clearly and lucidly and makes good use of his teaching experience in Japan (Hakan Ringbom, Abo Akademi University). Japan offers a prime example of lexical borrowing which relates to language transfer in second and foreign language learning. The insights gained by examining language borrowing in Japan can be applied wherever language contact has occurred and foreign languages are learned.Many of the most important English vocabulary may already exist in native lexicons. This pioneering book examines Japanese lexical borrowing, clarifies the effect of cognates on foreign language acquisition, assesses Japanese cognates that correspond to high-frequency and academic English, and discusses using this resource in teaching. It includes extensive lists of loanword cognates.

On-line information -- and free text in particular -- has emerged as a major, yet unexploited, resource available in raw form. Available, but not accessible. The lexicon provides the major key for enabling accessibility to on-line text. The expert contributors to this book explore the range of possibilities for the generation of extensive lexicons. In so doing, they investigate the use of existing on-line dictionaries and thesauri, and explain how lexicons can be acquired from the corpus -- the text under investigation -- itself. Leading researchers in four related fields offer the latest investigations: computational linguists cover the natural language processing aspect; statisticians point out the issues involved in the use of massive data; experts discuss the limitations of current technology; and lexicographers share their experience in the design of the traditional dictionaries.

This book is unique because it explores the multilingual lexicon by providing insights from research studies conducted in psycholinguistics, applied linguistics and neurolinguistics. It goes beyond the use of two languages and thus concentrates on a new and developing area in linguistic research. The different perspectives provide a link to the mainstream work on the lexicon and vocabulary acquisition and will stimulate further debate in these areas and in the study of multilingualism.