Vocabulary acquisition

Acquiring the words of one's language is, in principle, a challenging problem, but children solve it surprisingly easily. This article covers (1) the skills (speech perception, speech segmentation, and speech production) that children must acquire before producing their first words; (2) the main theories attempting to explain how the meaning of words is acquired; (3) the role of working memory in learning words; and (4) the acquisition of vocabulary beyond the early years. The tension between nativist and constructivist theories is discussed, as well as the challenges faced by future research.