In this week’s reading, Clark and Hecht discussed young children’s gradual acquisition of the ability to use suffixes like ‘-er’ when creating agent and instrument nouns. They showed that this acquisition generally occurs in three stages, eventually reaching a more mature understanding of when to use ‘-er’ to produce consistent forms of agents and instruments. I found it particularly interesting that, from observation, children can spontaneously create new words to fill in for their small vocabularies, as early as being one or two years of age! Furthermore, while their grasp of language devices is also incomplete, they will coin these words using language devices that they do know, although they may not be the ones that adults would usually use. However, these observational studies drew insights that had not been garnered from the experimental studies—what was the gap between these studies that resulted in divergent conclusions?
One question I would love to further explore is what kind of understanding do children show when they coin new words using non-conventional language devices, and what do children know or think about their listener’s understanding when they use such words? Children must have some conception that their listener comprehends the new words they coin—but how far does this idea extend? How do children gain the innate trust that by using the correct language devices on a suffix like ‘-er’, they will be producing words that others can understand? Clark and Hecht bring up ideas like semantic transparency, productivity, and conventionality to help explain different levels of understanding in word formation—however, children seem to interpret these things a little differently than we do. For instance, the idea of conventionality to a child with a smaller vocabulary would simply consist of what is represented in their repertoire, not what an adult would consider to be conventional. Thus, their idea of conventionality is constantly in flux; this is an interesting connection to draw between Clark and Hecht’s research and the other topics we have discussed in this class. What is the connection between an understanding of language that is perpetually changing, and the idea of a Universal Grammar that is innate to all of us? How can these concepts hang together, or is the Universal Grammar a type of subset of our changing conception of language?
Finally, while Clark and Hecht’s paper shows us that children will develop a consistent use of ‘-er’ in parallel with the principles of transparency, productivity, and conventionality, would these same results be found in connection with other suffixes, or parts of language besides ‘-er’? It would be interesting to apply the same methods of analysis to other morphemes that we studied in this class, and see whether the three-level approach asserted by Clark and Hecht still holds. For instance, Clark and Hecht wrote that children first learn how to use compounding—would this method still work for morphemes that do not allow compounds like ‘break-man’ to express ‘someone who breaks things’?
I found it interesting that you mentioned the question of how children can be sure that their listeners can understand the words that they have created. In my experience talking to children, when they make up words, to them these seem like real words and thus they don't seem to have a worry that we wouldn't understand them. I think that especially when they create made up compound words to convey certain meanings, the intended meaning is so obvious that we can infer it, and they either know that we can infer it or assume that the word is real.
ReplyDeleteI found your insights and implications at the end to be interesting because I had similar questions of what sort of suffixes are learned as new word forms early on versus '-er'. What does it mean for a child to understand how affixes create new meaning for words that essentially exist as a base word? The implications of this research have more insight into the psychology of linguistics.
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