The More Words, the Better

Clark’s paper talks about how children learn ‘-er’ endings and instrument nouns. The study found that children often construct new works to fill gaps in their vocabulary; for example, a child will infer that “typewrite” is someone who typewrites based on the noun “typewriter.”

How does one know when a word can be transformed to a noun by adding ‘er’ (i.e. write -> writer) and when it cannot (i.e. typewrite -> typewriter)? And broadly, how does one know when it’s appropriate to apply a general rule to a specific instance?

In Symsys1, we talked about how learning often follows an inductive fashion. For example, learning the concept of “dog” involves seeing several examples of dogs, which inform the concept of a dog in our minds. Similarly, by learning inductively, we do not have to list all negative examples or exceptions to the definition—without being told, we know that a table is not a dog. On the other hand, it’s difficult to learn the concept of a “dog” through deductive learning because we are not able to provide a comprehensive yet specific enough definition that compensates for all dogs in the universe.

Thus, when children learn language, they learn not from generalizations, but rather from specific examples. There is no general rule that tells us how to distinguish between words like ‘writer’ from words like ‘typewriter.’ Instead, we start to realize which words can be transformed by adding ‘-er’ through examples and experiential knowledge, eventually forming a kind of “instinct” for language.  

"-er" Words, Compound Words, and Innovative Solutions

The Clark and Hecht reading looked at how children learned to use the -er suffix to formulate both agent (e.g. "baker") and instrument ("cutter") nouns in English. The study found that older children had more of a grasp on these concepts, and also that all the children used various different responses to the questions.

I was very intrigued by the variety of responses, as they show how we deal with language without the hand-hold of convention; "spontaneous word innovations," as Clark calls them. One device that children use very early on, and to a high degree, is compounding, where one combines words to create a word that shares their meaning. We see these everywhere in English; Clark gives "doghouse" and "painkiller" as examples; we also see "dishwasher," "lawnmower," "caregiver," etc., etc. German is also infamous for its compound words; Krankenwagen, for instance, means "ambulance," literally meaning "sick (krank) car (wagen)." Another great example is "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz," which means "the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling."

German is very closely related to Old English, which abounds with compound words. What do you call a king, the person who gives out gold and rewards in the mead-hall to his favorite thanes? Well, a bēahġifa, or "ring-giver," of course! A warrior? "Raven-feeder," since, well, ravens were said to eat the dead on battlefields. These types of words were known as kennings, from kenna, which means "to make known, to name." So, if you knew what these things were, in an essential way (i.e. their essential properties--that they feed ravens, or give rings) you could name them.
What is not always clear, in both -er words and compound words, is the actual mechanism of the word. For compound words, this is in the relationship between the words; If a garbage truck collects garbage, what does an icecream truck do? What, then, does a firetruck do? A dogsled isn't a sled for dogs, but a sled driven by dogs, but a doghouse is a house for dogs.
For -er words, I can understand why children would be confused; it can act as either an agent or instrument. A typewriter isn't the person who types the words, but is the instrument used to type them? Is a "chopper" a person who chops, or the instrument used to chop*? (As an aside, it's also a helicopter.) Finally, what about the comparative? "Closer," for instance, could mean "a thing that closes," "a person who closes (a deal, or a store, or a door, etc.)," or it could mean "more close"!

In light of English not really making much sense, I would say that the innovations of children are just as valid as what convention would have us say--it's just that convention's been around longer. I think it's kind of a shame, in fact, that "children consistently relinquish their own innovations in favor of the conventional words for those meanings," as Clark points out. However, I suppose we have to reach some kind of standard.

*This makes the kitchen appliance called the "Slap Chop" particularly linguistically interesting, as it should be called the "Slap Chopper"

Language Acquisition

Clark and Hecht’s paper examines the acquisition of affixes in agents and instrument nouns. Children have the ability, as do adults, to come up with new words through the use of compounding. This is exemplified through the idea of adding ‘-er’ as a suffix to a word to make it an agent or instrument noun.

An interesting element of the research is the finding that the acquisition of the ability to construct new words in this fashion is preceded by a period of sporadic and inconsistent uses of the agent. This clearly indicated the gradual acquisition of language through trial and error.

The conclusion finds that children acquire language by constructing new word forms that follow certain principles/rules. These include the principles of semantic transparency, productivity and conventionality.

An extremely interesting area which I would be curious to explore more would be the idea of other languages. This is briefly touched on in the paper, and there is a discussion of how German equivalents of these agents are instrument nouns are generally attained at a younger age by German children. I would be curious to see the effects of having English be a child’s second language on their ability to acquire these language skills. Furthermore, I think the comparison between children and adults learning English as a second language would be a very interesting topic to explore further.

What does this word mean?

This week's reading by Clark looked at the cognitive development steps that are taken by children vs adults in vocabulary development and language inherently. The Clark article did a study of around 48 children and looked at the development and comprehension of different words, i.e. stop vs stopper and similar words. Somehow there is an innate development that these children use to fill in words that they have not seen before. I thought it was fascinating that the study found three driving principles that helped these children, that is the principle of semantic transparency, productivity and conventionality.

I think it's crazy that children can figure out more complex word and linguistic comparisons to make more abstract comprehensions. I wonder if there's any relation between the study here about the development of the children's comprehension of new words, and the Carnie study article that we read at the beginning of the year. That article summarized a few points about generative grammar, which would inherently lead to sounds like "-er" and more complex grammatical creations.

I'd be interested in a real world context what a more 'conventional' word is (or more common). I have a feeling this might be more of an innate description. One other takeaway is the close relationship between the grammatical syntax of language and how that syntax better informs the meaning of certain words. I think before Ling 1, I thought of them as separate entities but the more I'm reading and learning in this class, the more I see how interconnected these two ideas of language and comprehension are. 

This reading reminded of certain languages like chinese, latin and english and how these type of comparison words based on conventional ideas like the aforementioned "stop" vs "stopper" are formed. For example in Chinese, there is a similar idea for the words "wash" and "washer" where one of a verb and the other is a noun. Interestingly enough, these two words, although completely separate in meaning, use the same stem for the basic makeup (similar to retaining "wash" in English), which is awesome! 

I'm curious to see if there are any cases, where this doesn't match up in other languages, i.e how languages evolved differently than perhaps English or Chinese did. Or maybe that's not even the right question to ask. Cool paper!

kitchen appliance naming institute

This week’s reading was on a study conducted by Eve V. Clark and Barbara Frant Hecht on the acquisition of productive control in using the ‘-er’ suffix in the agent and instrument contexts. They develop a model of generalizing word forms that consists of semantic transparency, productivity, and conventionality which is consistent with the gradient of acquisition that children display across age groups. The study reminded me of Mitch Hedburg’s ‘kitchen appliance naming institute' joke (https://youtu.be/0lwpS5M7hgA) in which he pokes fun at the generalization of the '-er' to nontypical appliances.

I appreciated the author’s attempt to explaining this particular phenomenon in developmental linguistics, but I was left with the feeling that their learning rule was specific to the point of not being particularly useful. That is, I wonder what underlying principles in children’s psychology and overall development would lead to the rules of semantic transparency, productivity, and conventionality being advantageous to employ. 

Nerding out about word etymologies

I've always been a fan of learning where words come from -- their etymologies. Sometimes these give interesting stories about where a word comes from, how its meaning has evolved. It's not the most useful thing in the world, but I love it when I can see connections between languages; a lot of these etymologies involve word-loans. 

Take, for example, the word "assassin". One proposed etymology is the following: members of a fanatical Muslim sect during the Crusades used to smoke hashish and then murder leaders on the opposing side. They started going by the name "hashishiyyin," meaning hashish-users in Arabic. Through centuries of mispronunciation, we arrived at "assassin." 

I find it not at all a fault of our language that we use "assassin" more frequently than a compound word that might be more intuitive. The term "assassination" is one of the conventions that Clark talks about; with it, we can get to a more nuanced meaning. 

We seem to be perfectly adept at using a vast amount of words correctly -- we don't need that much help here, but language learners do. Babies struggle in the less orthodox parts of the language, e.g. past participle formation or learning word variations for agent and instrument.

We don't worry much about simplifying these things because, as humans, we are so adapted for language. These growing pains that Clark documents are gone by eleven or twelve at the latest, and then we take the ability for granted. Sometimes these irregularities allow us to use language as a better tool. Even when they are seemingly purposeless, I like that they reflect the dynamic way our language is created and evolves.

The Acquisition of New Words

This weeks reading looked at how children form words to describe agents and instruments not already in their vocabulary. It looked primarily at how these children formed words to explain these ideas, through the use of compound words, by adding the suffix -er, or by using a separate vocabulary word for an object or person who does, or is capable of doing that action. It showed that as children grow older, they begin to use the suffix -er more, with agents more than instruments, while younger children tend to compound words like: bite-thing, or build-man.
This once again goes to show just how complicated a language like English is very complicated, and lots of parts of it are not intuitive or innate and must be learned by convention. It is particularly interesting to look at this in light of the fact that with German this same acquisition happens much earlier, at the ages of two to three. This tells us something about the differences between these languages. Going back to the discussion of innate language, this goes to show that while parts of language may be innate, obviously there is significant parts that are not, and the methods we have to acquire these must be affected by the spoken language to explain the differences between the English and German rate of acquisition of this particular concept in children.
It would also be interesting to see how this impacts someone who is learning another language, or someone learning English as second or further language as not all languages operate on this basis. Would this be more difficult a concept to acquire or would it be faster than children?

Children, Gaps, and Parenting

     In Eve V. Clark’s “Learning to coin agent and instrument nouns”, she and Barbara Frant Hecht dive into the usage of the suffix “-er” in children, and specifically how individuals learn to use the suffix at an early age. In their study, they put 48 children in individual rooms where they received targeted questions. Aged 3 to 6, they would be given sample questions such as “What does a stopper do?” in order to learn about their linguistics habits. Interestingly, they found that in terms of comprehension, all individuals understood the verb base in the word given. However, they found not the same for production. Clark and Hecht saw three key steps to predict the usage of “-er”: transparency, productivity, and conventionality. But they also noticed that the younger the individual, the more inconsistencies in their suffix usage for agent and instrument nouns. By the age of 5-7 they determined children learned to coin those specific types of nouns.

     I think this work made me really look at the difference between comprehension and production. As a native speaker, I often take grammar for granted. I comprehend things with undeniable ease, and never have to think about production exactly. But if asked to write all the rules of English out, I do not think I would be able to write a coherent standard for correctly producing the English language. Comprehension and production are entirely different, and it makes sense that the latter would take longer to acquire. Clark and Hecht also mentioned how we use our innate knowledge of language to fill in gaps in our vocabulary. If I do not know what a “stopper” is, for example, I can fill in that gap and assume it is someone who stops. As someone who has always considered themselves to have a bad range of vocabulary, I wonder how this extends to figuring out any type of word. I find that I often actually mislead myself when I try to fill in the gap of my vocabulary— I think a word sounds positive or shares a root with one word when in fact I am blatantly wrong. This may be, perhaps, due to the complexity of the English language, but it could also point to my general lacking of a complex vocabulary.

     This reading also brought back a point from a very early work in the quarter about language acquisition. This paper starts off with a sample conversation of a woman and child. Does it matter if the mother even informs her child that the object is in fact a typewriter, because research would suggest this correction has no influence? This reading seemed to agree to that point, yet it still seems irresponsible. Are parents supposed to have faith in the developmental patterns of children and assume the child will learn the correct usage of the suffix “-er” in agent and instrument nouns?

Agents, Instruments, and that Pesky English -er

In this week’s readings, Clark and Hecht present their findings about young children’s use of the affix –er in agents and instruments. Several previous studies indicated that children learned such words only around the ages of 5 to 7; however, Clark and Hecht demonstrate that these words comprise a significant part of many children’s vocabulary at even earlier ages, though often in simpler forms. With the three principles of semantic transparency, productivity, and conventionality in mind, they demonstrate that children initially use some form of compounding to create new words spontaneously, eventually transitioning to using the suffix –er after observing common patterns in the spoken language.

English is a very widespread language, albeit not an intuitive one. Without knowledge of the affix –er, I feel that words ending in –er certainly would be less instinctive than compounded words formed from smaller, meaningful parts. I would imagine that there are many simpler languages which use compounding to assemble new words. I think it would be interesting to see how English itself has grown as a language; instead of just observing its use in the present, it would be thought-provoking to trace the introduction of the affix –er in earlier predecessors of English. Was it meant to distinguish English from more “primitive” languages (after all, even 3-year-old children can use compounded words!), or was it merely implemented to simplify the conversion of verbs to nouns?

In addition, I’m interested how these results translate from young children to older individuals learning English as a second language. Though I would expect somewhat similar results, I think that there generally would be a shorter transition from using compounding to using –er when creating new words. On a related note, I am a native English speaker, but I can converse in Mandarin Chinese at a reasonable level. However, there are many words that I can’t describe succinctly due to my relatively small vocabulary, and instead of using conventional names, I end up using many known words together to describe these objects. Essentially, I demonstrate the compounding behavior as described by Clark and Hecht, and I’d imagine that this is a common trend among many language learners.

Relating this back to linguistic stereotypes, I wonder if there have been any studies regarding the social impacts of the use of compounded words as opposed to their conventional forms. Several weeks ago, Rickford discussed how the use of AAVE resulted in disadvantages in a society dominated by Standard English speakers, while Professor Sumner discussed how speech serves as a revealing linguistic and social agent. Similarly, I’m curious how native speakers of languages react to unconventional, “contrived” words (ie. those formed using compounding). Interestingly, these stereotypes also would be influenced by age; for instance, hearing such words from a 6-year-old might lead to thoughts of immaturity, while the same words from a 40-year-old might generate labels of “second language” or even “uneducated.” What other patterns could be discovered in studies that address the use of such words?