What does it take to learn a word?

Vocabulary learning is deceptively hard, but toddlers often make it look easy. Prior theories proposed that children's rapid acquisition of words is based on languagespecific knowledge and constraints. In contrast, more recent work converges on the view that word learning proceeds via domaingeneral processes that are tuned to richly structurednot impoverishedinput. We argue that new theoretical insights, coupled with methodological tools, have pushed the field toward an appreciation of simple, contentfree processes working together as a system to support the acquisition of words. We illustrate this by considering three central phenomena of early language development: referential ambiguity, fastmapping, and the vocabulary spurt. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.