Word formation. Major and minor ways of word formation content introduction

2.2
THE RATE OF NEW-WORD LEARNING IN CHILDREN 
The process of learning the words of a language is referred to 
as 
Vocabulary Acquisition. 
As discussed below, the ways in which 
young children acquire the 
vocabulary
 of a native language
 
differ from 
the ways in which older children and adults acquire the vocabulary of a 
second language. 
 
MEANS OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 

Language Acquisition 

Active Vocabulary and Passive Vocabulary 

Annotation 

Context Clues 

English as a Second Language (ESL) 

Lexical Competence 

Lexicon 

Listening and Speech 

Overgeneralization 

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
Poverty of the Stimulus 

Reading and Writing 

World Knowledge 
The rate of new-word learning is not constant but ever increasing. 
Thus between the ages of 1 and 2 years, most children will learn less 
than one word a day whilst a 17-year-old will learn about 10,000 new 
words per year, mostly from reading. The theoretical implication is that 
there is no need to posit a qualitative change in learning or a specialized 
word-learning system to account for the 'remarkable' rate at which 
young children learn words; one could even argue that, given the 
number of new words to which they are exposed daily, infants' word 
learning is remarkably slow."
THE VOCABULARY SPURT 
At some point, most children manifest a 
vocabulary spurt
, where the 
rate of acquisition of new words increases suddenly and markedly. From 
then until about six years old, the average rate of acquisition is estimated 
to be five or more words a day. Many of the new words 
are verbs and adjectives, which gradually come to assume a larger 
proportion of the child's vocabulary. The vocabulary acquired during 
this period partly reflects frequency and relevance to the child's 
environment. 
Basic level
terms are acquired first, possibly reflecting a 
bias towards such terms in 
child-directed speech
. . . 
Children appear to need minimal exposure to a new word form 
(sometimes just a single occurrence) before they assign some kind of 

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meaning to it; this process of 
rapid mapping
appears to help them to 
consolidate the form in their memory. In the early states, mapping is 
exclusively from form to meaning; but it later also takes place from 
meaning to form, as children coin words to fill gaps in their vocabulary.