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S35MZ
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Introduction<br />
ARTÍCULO<br />
Word Learning During First<br />
Language Acquisition:<br />
Linking Sounds<br />
to Referents<br />
EvA RoDRíguEZ CáRDEnAS<br />
Licenciada en Filología Inglesa. Universidad de La Rioja. Logroño. La Rioja. España.<br />
eva.rodricar@gmail.com<br />
ABSTRACT<br />
The issue of child language acquisition has been the focus of many researches since it<br />
“took off” in the early 1960s and a great amount of data has been collected since then.<br />
The question of how children acquire language has awakened the interest of experts from<br />
many different fields: psychology, physiology, neurology, but especially linguists. Increasingly<br />
sophisticated means of testing linguistic knowledge that is available to children have been<br />
developed during the last years. However, although these new techniques have made it<br />
possible to know a great deal more about what children do as they acquire their native<br />
language, the question of how they do it remains open. This article is a review of a group of<br />
articles found in different scientific journals during the last two decades (1993-2011) which<br />
try to clarify the complex process of language acquisition.<br />
Key words: Language acquisition, Word learning, Linking sounds.<br />
Within the process of language acquisition different<br />
stages have been identified, some are prelanguage<br />
stages and others are language ones.<br />
This demonstrates that the development of child<br />
language speech follows a gradual progression<br />
towards adults’ language, being each stage characterised<br />
by some features which mark the differences<br />
with the previous one. Many researches<br />
have been made in order to state the clear edges<br />
of these stages and their characteristics.<br />
The aim of this article is to focus on word<br />
learning, more concretely on how children<br />
identify (new) words, how they map meanings<br />
onto those words and how they store and organize<br />
all this information in their minds. This<br />
state of the art is composed of a group of articles<br />
found in different scientific journals during<br />
the last two decades (1993-2011) which try to<br />
discover the means by which children are capable<br />
of achieving this word acquisition.<br />
Word learning and phonetics<br />
The task of word learning has two parts: one is<br />
recognising a sound pattern, the phonetic form<br />
of the word, and the other is to relate these<br />
Esdrújula. Revista de filología 131