F he acquisition of the lexicon)

The average time it takes a child to learn the first 10 to 50 words is quite long: 4.8 months. It means that the rate of the first words acquisition is about 10 new words a month.

By 18 months children can use about 50 words and understand about five times as many. Within these 50 words there are nominals and action words, modifiers and function words, the words for personal and social relations. There are individual differences in early lexical development. Some children learn more object labels to talk about familiar environment, some children learn more pronouns and function words to to talk about themselves and others /Nelson 1981/.

After that age a 'vocabulary explosion' takes place. By the age of two children's spoken

vocabulary exceeds 200 words. By the age of seven children know about 1300 words and

schoolchildren learn thousands of new words per year. It is estimated that the average

Oxford undergraduate has a vocabulary of about 75,000 words.

Many reputable linguists have challenged these estimates. A very careful study made by a ^roup of psychologists presents the following figures: an average four-year old child cnows over 5,000 words; at six, he reaches a vocabulary of 14,000 words; at eight, of 26,000 words; at ten, of 34,000. They claim that a college-educated adult's mental lexicon nay be up to 250,000 of words /Katamba 1994:228/.

Again, estimations vary widely due to methodological difficulties and different understandings of the term 'word'.

Learning vocabulary means not only memorizing labels for certain concepts but also acquiring the rules according to which so many of these labels are created. Children acquire the derivational system of the language by the age of four, and from that time their vocabulary grows intensively thanks to the correct application of derivational rules and derivational morphemes. The majority of words they learn after that age are derived words.

Measuring the rate of children's word-acquisition is the easiest thing in the theory of the lexicon acquisition. A far more difficult thing is to explain HOW it happens, and that is left to theoreticians.

In theoretical linguistics the problem of vocabulary acquisition is quite new. Little has been done to reveal the nature of word learning so far, and there are more questions than answers in this field. But all the linguists whose concern is the lexicon point out that there is a great need for such a theory. The ideas of complexity and idiosyncratic nature of the lexicon, of the innate linguistic ability and categorization principles are definitely not enough to explain children's process of vocabulary acquisition.

Scholars discuss the problem of ability to segment varying sound wave into words, and there is a belief that children can do it because of rhythmic alternation.

Concept and word acquisition requires the ability to catcgori/e, and scholars question whether children's mental representations are the same as adults' ones.

Techniques for deciding what a word may mean are under consideration. There are some theories on that, and one of them states that for a child a new word stands for the whole thing, not its parts.

Scholars argue about the links between syntax and lexicon in the process of word-acquisition. Some scholars believe that children make use of syntactic structures in which the words occur. These structures narrow the range of possible interpretations.

The question of the degree of brain activization is also discussed. The recent interactive activation theory suggests that the mind is an enormously powerful network in which any word which resembles the one heard is automatically activated, and that each of these triggers its own neighbours, so that activation gradually spreads like ripples on a pond. The opposite view on word acquisition stresses the effectiveness of the mind and "the least efforts principle" that would never allow for such a procedure.

The problem of vocabulary acquisition has been approached from a variety of perspectives: linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, neurolinguistic. Each of them brings something new to the understanding of the phenomenon. But due to this diversity it

is sometimes difficult for scholars to communicate with one another, because they come from different traditions, use different methodology and work on different data. Theories on vocabulary acquisition are still in the process of developing.

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