Gaskell, G.
Department of Psychology, University of York, UK
Evidence is accumulating that the acquisition and retention of novel words involves an extended process of consolidation, with some immediately observable lexical effects, and some more protracted sleep-associated characteristics. This profile of acquisition suggests that language learning is constrained by more general properties of memory, and is consistent in broad terms with a complementary systems approach. However, it is less clear what defines a delayed property and why. Here, I will discuss two possible models. In the first, immediate and delayed components of a new word representation are distinguished by the level of integration between recent and remote memories of lexical items. In the second, the key distinguishing feature is the speed of retrieval of the recently learned lexical representation. Recent evidence from word learning studies of both form and meaning will be evaluated against these two models, and I will argue that the speed-of-retrieval model provides the best fit to the existing data.