Poznan09

Lexical development - 10 classes

Ewa Haman

The course is intended as an introduction to psycholinguistic research on the acquisition of words in children. For years the issue of lexical development was a stepchild in child language studies, independently of theoretical viewpoint . After the last two decades of investigations in this subject, it is now already evident that the topic is neither simple nor insignificant.

The goal of the course is to present and discuss the most important discoveries from the last 20 years of psycholinguistic research on child lexicon in the areas of:

1. Speech perception (infants’ abilities of word discrimination in speech)
2. Semantics (basic mechanisms underlying attribution of meaning to sequences of sounds)
3. Grammatical categories (the composition of early lexicon – distribution of basic parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives)
4. Lexical-conceptual interface (interrelations between conceptual and lexical development)
5. Vocabulary size (the influence of quantity of words in child mental lexicon on other domains of language and cognitive development)

Each topic will be illustrated by various empirical studies from a range of languages (also in a crosslinguistic designs).

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