UC San Diego

Word learning is a multidimensional process that develops and changes throughout the human lifespan. The current dissertation presents three studies that set out to examine the construction of lexical representations by investigating how and whether learning context and language proficiency influence partial knowledge of newly-learned words. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the complexity contributing to uncertainty about word learning and the primary assessments used to examine this process in research. Chapter 2 investigates word learning in linguistically-supportive contexts in 10- to 12-year-old children. The results indicate that, even when the meaning of nonsense words was initially successfully mapped, meaning-nonsense word pairings were not readily available immediately following learning. Additionally, an error analysis shows that semantic information was not available for partially-learned nonsense words. Chapter 3 presents a similar pattern of findings with adults. Taken together, these two studies suggest that linguistically-supportive contexts might not lead to a robust enough representation for subsequent recognition and also that semantic information may not be available for partially-learned words. Chapter 4 evaluates the influence of dual language exposure on word learning in Spanish. Childhood and adult proficiency in Spanish did not predict the successful initial pairing of the novel word to its meaning. However, after a period of consolidation, childhood proficiency in Spanish and word learning modality did have an effect on successful word learning. Specifically, people with higher childhood Spanish proficiency had less successful recall of the meaning of a novel word when the word was learned in the auditory modality and the opposite pattern was found for novel words that were learned in the written modality; people with higher childhood Spanish proficiency had more successful recall of these words. Thus, the influence of childhood or adulthood Spanish proficiency on word learning does not appear to broadly have an impact. Together these studies show that the word learning literature is ever-evolving; the findings of the current dissertation highlight the need for further research in partial word knowledge.