Festschrifts

The early stages of lexical development in children pose various questions about the selection and application of word-learning heuristics. In many proposals these processes are assumed to be facilitated by a specific lexical bias that differs in strength in monolingual and bilingual populations, namely, the Mutual Exclusivity (ME) bias (Markman & Wachtel 1988; Houston-Price et al. 2010). The present study analyzes the role and operation of ME bias in the bilingual vocabulary acquisition of a child who is acquiring Bulgarian and English from birth in the US. The analysis focuses on the child production of translation equivalents (TEs) at three measurement points: 18, 24 and 30 months. The findings reveal a flexible use of the ME bias modulated by the child bilingual linguistic experience and his emerging understanding of word-concept mappings in different contexts.