Variation and Adaptation in Lexical Processing and Acquisition

Recent emphasis on language knowledge as an emergent dynamic system has drawn considerable attention to the role of time in the way speakers acquire and use their own language. There are at least three levels on which time matters. At the processing level, the interaction between processing and memory constraints, and in particular between short-term and long-term memory issues, is understood to shape the way we recode and organise time-bound sequences of linguistic signals. On an ontogenetic scale, the age of acquisition of language input data, and the duration of exposure (in the case of multilingual contexts) are known to interact with issues of cognitive maturation and brain plasticity, yielding different outcomes as a function of different time intervals. In this connection, also the distribution of input data in a particular linguistic environment (both in terms of word type and token frequency) is bound to have an impact on rate and speed of acquisition and on overall knowledge organisation. Finally, all previously mentioned time-effects conspire to make the language system change through usage and acquisition in passing from one generation to the ensuing one.