Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework of "learning through processing" and relate it to the prevailing methods used to assess children's early knowledge of words. Incorporating recent empirical work, we posit a specific, testable timeline of qualitative changes in the learning process in this interval. We conclude with several challenges and avenues for building a comprehensive theory of early word learning: better characterization of the input, reconciling results across approaches, and treating lexical knowledge in the nascent grammar with sufficient sophistication to ensure generalizability across languages and development.

中文翻译：

---

通过处理学习：迈向早期单词学习的综合方法。

儿童的语言知识和他们获取语言知识的学习机制在婴儿期和蹒跚学步期间大幅增长，但单词学习理论在很大程度上未能纳入这些转变。此外，研究人员通常孤立地关注熟悉的单词识别或新单词学习，这限制了对这两者之间关系的批判性思考。作为迈向语言习得机制理论的一步，我们提出了一个“通过处理学习”的框架，并将其与用于评估儿童早期单词知识的流行方法联系起来。结合最近的实证工作，我们提出了一个特定的、可测试的时间线，说明这段时间内学习过程中的质变。我们总结了建立早期单词学习综合理论的几个挑战和途径：