Lexiconverwerving

Lexiconverwerving is the process by which a speaker or language learner gains and refines their mental lexicon—the repository of knowledge about words, including form, meaning, pronunciation, and grammatical properties. In linguistic and cognitive science literature, lexiconverwerving encompasses the acquisition of vocabulary across first language development as well as second language learning, and includes how new words are added, integrated with existing knowledge, and accessed in real time during speech and comprehension.

Mental representations involved in lexiconverwerving include lemmas and lexemes. Lemmas encode meaning and syntactic properties, while lexemes encode phonology and morphophonology. Lexiconverwerving is influenced by input quality and quantity, frequency of exposure, distributional information, phonotactic constraints, and morphological structure. Theoretical accounts vary: connectionist models emphasize statistical learning and distributed representations; rule-based models stress stored lexical entries with explicit subcategorization frames; and usage-based approaches highlight social interaction and communicative purposes.

Acquisition processes include incidental learning during ordinary language exposure, explicit instruction in vocabulary, fast mapping in children, and cross-situational learning in adults. Learners rely on cues such as context, semantic similarity, and orthographic or phonological information to form and stabilize lexical entries. In second language learning, lexical development often interacts with or precedes syntactic development, and bilingual lexica involve cross-language activation and transfer phenomena.

Methods of study cover corpus-based frequency analyses, laboratory experiments (such as lexical decision, priming, and fast mapping tasks), and computational modeling. Practical implications include vocabulary instruction, reading development, and language rehabilitation. Lexiconverwerving remains an active area of research across psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and education.