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8 - The Acquisition of Irish Vocabulary

from Part III - Acquisition of Vocabulary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2025

Vicky Chondrogianni
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Ciara O'Toole
Affiliation:
University College Cork
Enlli Thomas
Affiliation:
Bangor University
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Summary

Acquisition of vocabulary in Irish is of interest for many reasons. For example, Irish has a verb–subject–object word order, placing verbs in a more salient sentence position compared to nouns, and lexical verbs are repeated/negated in response to a yes/no question. Lexical items in Irish carry rich inflectional information, the acquisition of which may slow down the overall acquisition of words. Furthermore, Irish vocabulary is acquired in a context of universal bilingualism, so can inform us about bilingual language acquisition in a minority language context. The chapter will review how children acquire comprehension and expression of Irish vocabulary categories compared to other languages, and how Irish vocabulary develops in line with that of English. Using data from longitudinal and cross-sectional research collected through parent diaries, corpus data, parent report, and direct testing, the chapter reviews the internal and external factors that influence overall vocabulary attainment as well as the changes in Irish vocabulary knowledge that have been observed across the generations. Finally, future directions for research that have emerged from these studies will be explored.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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