How do children learn their first words? The field of language development has been polarized by responses to this question. Explanations range from accounts that emphasize the importance of cognitive heuristics in language acquisition, to those that highlight the role of "dumb attentional mechanisms" in word learning. This monograph offers an alternative to these accounts. A hybrid view of word-learning, called the emergentist coalition theory, combines cognitive constraints, social-pragmatic factors, and global attentional mechanisms to arrive at a balanced account of how children construct principles of word learning. In twelve experiments, with children ranging from 12 to 25 months of age, data are described that support the emergentist coalition theory.
George J. Hollich received his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1999, and is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His current research interests include computational modeling of language learning, testing of infant language comprehension and speech perception, and the development of domain-specific skill from domain-general mechanisms.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1981. She is a professor of Psychology at Temple University. Her primary research focuses on early language development in children zero-to-three emphasizing how infants process the input in ways that assist them in learning words and grammar. She also focuses on issues within cognitive development that bridge the gap between science and policy. As such, she conducted research on the "hurried child," and she is one of the investigators in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Publications include: Hirsh-Pasek, The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension. MIT Press, Cambridge; and Rescorla, L., Hydson, M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (1991) "Academic Instruction in Early Childhood: Challenge or Pressure?" in W. Damon (Gen. Ed.) New Directions in Developmental Psychology, 53, Jossey-Bass: New York. Dr. Hirsh-Pasek is on teh editorial board of Child Development and Infancy.
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973. She is H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education, Psychology, and Linguistics at the University of Delaware. Much of her work focuses on early language acquisition in both the lexical and syntactic domain. She has been the recipient of a James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Publications include: Golinkoff, R. M. & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (1999) How Babies Talk. Dutton/Penguin: New York; Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Akhtar, N., Bloom, L., Holich, G., Smith, L., Tomasello, M., & Woodward, A. (2000) Becoming a Word Learner: A Debate on Lexical Acquisition. Oxford Press: New York; and edited three books. She has been on the editorial boards of Child Development, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, The Journal of Educational Psychology, and Developmental Psychology.
