Increasingly, researchers from the social-pragmatic, constraints/principles, and associationistic perspectives recognize the necessity of multiple factors from a number of domains in accounting for word learning. Indeed, Bloom and Lahey first embraced the true complexity of language and word learning in 1978, when they proposed the idea of mutual dependency between form, content and use. In 1993, Bloom wrote,“cognitive development bring the infant to the threshold of language only in conjunction with other developments in expression and social connectedness”(p. 52). Her continuing insistence (see Bloom, in press) on the child’s role in actively coordinating multiple inputs to solve the word learning problem forms the foundation for the theory to be presented here. Recently, other voices have joined the call for interactive theories. Baldwin and Tomasello (1998), for example, write the word learning “S requires an explanation encompassing both its social and cognitive roots”(p. 19). Finally, in a recent review of the field, Woodward and Markman (1998) explicitly state that none of the proposed solutions for the word learning problem is sufficient to explain how children acquire their first words. Rather, they write,“word learning depends on an ability to recruit and integrate information from a range of sources”(p. 371). The emergentist coalition theory offers a hybrid approach that is sensitive to the multiple strategies children use to break the word barrier and to move from being novice to expert word learners. The complexity of word learning requires a model that embraces findings from the constraints/principles, associationist, and social-pragmatic literatures, thereby adopting a position that has been called “the radical middle”(Newcombe, 1998). The emergentist coalition model posits that children’s lexical development is the product of intricate, epigenetic interactions between multiple factors. Principles in the constraints/principles theories are the products of attentional/associationistic factors in early development, which then become the engines of subsequent development. Likewise, the socialpragmatic expertise evidenced by 18-and 24-month-olds in word learning