User:Mr. Stradivarius/Frequency hypothesis

Frequency accounts of language acquisition are hypotheses about the relationship between the process of language acquisition and the frequency in which linguistic items are found in the input encountered by language learners. In the original account, Hatch and Wagner Gough's frequency hypothesis of 1974, frequency was claimed to be a direct predictor of the order of acquisition of linguistic items. However, experimental evidence gave mixed results. More recently, accounts based on a connectionist model have revisited the role of frequency in language acquisition.

==the frequency hypothesis was first suggested in 1976 by Hatch and Wagner-Gough. They claimed that the frequency of linguistic items in the input was a direct predictor of the order in which learners acquired them

Connectionist approaches
In the 1990s and 2000s the effects of frequency on language acquisition were revisited by scholars working under a connectionist paradigm. Connectionist accounts of language acquisition assume that learning occurs when connections between in the brain are strengthened. For this process to occur, the learner must be exposed to a large amount of language input. The frequency of the input is seen to be a central factor in how language is acquired.

Vocabulary
The number of times a learner hears a new word is an important predictor of how well it will be learned. However, in second-language acquisition, the frequency of a word is not the only factor that affects the learning of vocabulary. The effort needed to learn a word is significantly reduced if it is a loanword or a cognate which the learner recognises. Lightbown and Spada give the following three lists of words as an example:

Although the words in list one are short and have meanings which are easy to understand, they may not be familiar to students who have had no previous English study. However, the words in the other two lists may be recognised straight away. The words in list two are common loanwords from English, and the students will likely be familiar with them from their native language. Likewise, the words in list three look very similar to words in some European languages and students may recognise them on sight, despite the fact that they are relatively long and occur only infrequently.