Complexities and constraints in nonword repetition and word learning

Abstract

Because words represent the building blocks upon which the facility to produce and comprehend language at all levels is based, the capacity of a child to learn words has immense impact on his or her developing abilities to communicate and engage properly with the outside world. Both the Keynote Article and the Commentaries in this issue demonstrate that this capacity to acquire vocabulary is neither singular nor simple. Children may fail to learn new words in as rapid and efficient manner as their peers for many reasons: they may, for example, have inadequate environmental experience of either the spoken and printed form of the language (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991), or they may have poor abilities to produce the sound contrasts of the language (Mirak & Rescorla, 1998). The focus of the present discussion lies somewhere in between these extremes of influence, in the intervening perceptual and cognitive processes that constitute the speech processing and word learning system. Here, too, complexities abound. The developing language system is characterized by dependencies between the multiple processes involved in processing and learning language (Bishop, 1997), rarely evincing the dramatic dissociations in adults with acquired language disorders that have served cognitive neuropsychology so well in its bid to identify a modular structure of the language system. Weaknesses in perceptual analysis of the sound structure of the language, in the storage of the resulting mental representations, and in the availability of existing representations that can support the processing of new words, often coexist within an individual. As a consequence, it can be extremely difficult to tease apart the developmental underpinnings of language acquisition. In this article, I argue that real progress toward understanding vocabulary acquisition requires a substantial and systematic body of research evidence designed to provide strong empirical challenges to existing (and new) hypotheses and theories. Whereas mere description is unlikely to lead to major advances, systematic experimental analysis and the specification of detailed theoretical accounts should result in a more complete understanding of the complexities and constraints of new word learning.