Our qualitative literature review of 31 published studies found that (a) three major approaches are used in early childhood classrooms to support children's vocabulary learning--exposing children to advanced words, providing direct word-meaning instruction, and employing mixed-method interventions; (b) these practices support children's learning…

This article presents a wholistic picture of the major factors in the language learning process. (RC)

Two stages in the vocabulary development of two-year-olds are reported. In the earlier Receptive stage, the child says many fewer nouns than he understands and says no verbs at all although he understands many. The child then enters a Productive stage in which he says virtually all the nouns he understands plus his first verbs. (Author/DEP)

Presents a simple scheme, based on formal categories, for coding stylistic variation in the early lexicon. When applied to the first 50 and 100 words of 12 children between 0;11 and 2;3, the major dimensions of difference are found to be the relative proportion of common nouns and the relative proportion of frozen phrases. (31 references) (GLR)

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

There are problems in interpreting the naming behavior of children. Children may misname a word because the word is absent from their vocabulary, because it is not yet firmly established, or because of a word retrieval or lexical assessing problem. Preliminary results are reported of an experimental technique designed to account for these…

To understand the development of number-word construction, students in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 named and counted from a set of numbers into the billions in two studies. Findings are discussed both in relation to children's growing knowledge of the number system and to vocabulary development. (Author)

This study explores children's development of dual-level phonological processing posited by generative theory for adult language users. Evidence suggesting 6-year-olds' utilization of morphophonemic segments was obtained by asking children to imitate complex words, omit specified portions, and discuss the meaning of the resulting word-parts. The…

Reports on two studies that examined the natural process of word learning in children 4-11 years old. The children hear the new words in a conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Results indicate that children at all ages could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. (SED)

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…