Describe the development of vocabulary in preschoolers.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. The development of vocabulary proceeds at an extraordinary pace. Preschoolers learn an average of nine new words per day (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2006, 2014).Word learning, in fact, does not occur gradually but is better characterized as a fast-mapping process in which the child quickly attaches a new word to its appropriate concept (Waxman & Goswami, 2012). Children apparently have early cognitive biases or constraints that lead them to prefer certain meanings over others (Waxman & Goswami, 2012).Children also assume that words refer to whole objects and not to their component parts or their characteristics, such as color, size, or texture (Bloom, 2002). This bias is called the whole-object assumption.Children also seem to assume that objects have only one label. Therefore, novel terms must refer to unfamiliar objects and not to familiar objects that already have labels. This concept is the contrast assumption, which is also known as the mutual exclusivity assumption.