S35MZ

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