Words are fundamental to language, linking sound, articulation, and spelling to meaning and syntax; and lexical deficits are core to communicative disorders. Work in language acquisition commonly focuses on how lexical knowledge—knowledge of words’ sound patterns and meanings—is acquired. But lexical knowledge is insufficient to account for skilled language use. Sophisticated real-time processes must decode the sound pattern of words and interpret them appropriately. We review work that bridges this gap by using sensitive real-time measures (eye tracking in the visual world paradigm) of school-age children’s processing of highly familiar words. This work reveals that the development of word recognition skills can be characterized by changes in the rate at which decisions unfold in the lexical system (the activation rate). Moreover, contrary to the standard view that these real-time skills largely develop during infancy and toddlerhood, they develop slowly, at least through adolescence. In contrast, language disorders can be linked to differences in the ultimate degree to which competing interpretations are suppressed (competition resolution), and these differences can be mechanistically linked to deficits in inhibition. These findings have implications for real-world problems such as reading difficulties and second-language acquisition. They suggest that developing accurate, flexible, and efficient processing is just as important a developmental goal as is acquiring language knowledge.

单词是语言的基础，将声音、发音和拼写与意义和语法联系起来。词汇缺陷是沟通障碍的核心。语言习得工作通常关注词汇知识（单词声音模式和含义的知识）的获取方式。但词汇知识不足以解释熟练的语言使用。复杂的实时过程必须解码单词的声音模式并对其进行适当的解释。我们回顾了通过使用灵敏的实时测量（视觉世界范式中的眼动追踪）来衡量学龄儿童对高度熟悉的单词的处理来弥补这一差距的工作。这项工作表明，单词识别技能的发展可以通过词汇系统中决策展开速率（激活速率）的变化来表征。此外，与这些实时技能主要在婴儿期和幼儿期发展的标准观点相反，它们发展缓慢，至少在青春期是这样。相反，语言障碍可能与竞争性解释被抑制的最终程度的差异（竞争解决）有关，而这些差异在机制上可能与抑制缺陷有关。这些发现对现实世界的问题（例如阅读困难和第二语言习得）具有影响。他们认为，发展准确、灵活和高效的处理能力与获取语言知识一样重要。