Issues of Vocabulary Acquisition and Use

What’s a word? This seems like a simple question and almost any layman could come up with a description of word. It might be something like ‘a group of letters with an empty space on either side, which has a meaning’. For the layman, such a definition is probably perfectly adequate, as most people only need to conceptualise word well enough to look up ‘words’ in a dictionary, or to count how many ‘words’ are in a document they are writing. But if we want to push beyond this basic level of understanding, we must understand the intricacies of lexis and control for them in our vocabulary research designs. This section will discuss some of the interrelated characteristics of vocabulary you will need to address when dealing with words in your research.