Child-speak

Clark’s article, which explores how children fill gaps in their vocabulary and acquire language through principles of semantic transparency, productivity, and conventionality, reminded me of a poem I read in high school, “in Just –” by E. E. Cummings, that embodies childhood. In the poem, there are made-up words like “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” that, despite their novelty, convey easily understood meanings by combining familiar words. “Mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” are like grown-up child-speak (as in, Cummings, an adult with adult vocabulary, writes through a child’s viewpoint), in the vein of Clark’s semantic transparency.  We know what “mud” means and what “luscious” means, and as adults tasked with combining the two, we might say something like “lusciously muddy,” but Cummings’ curious “mud-luscious” invokes nuances of childlike simplicity and wonder at a fresh world.

Some might say that when we become adults, we lose the novel, unburdened perspectives of children because we become bound by all sorts of conventions. As adults, we know words that are right on the dot, retrievable labels for items in our world that children don’t know, so we don’t have to innovate. Since children don’t know, they’ll come up with something – to paraphrase Pablo Picasso, give them a blank vocabulary and they’ll fill it. Like Clark mentions, a “break-man” could be someone who breaks things. Tea could be “leaf water”; coffee could be “bean water.” Even if these terms are not real or conventional words or phrases, they still work and show a different way of thinking unique to children, like crawling through a space only big enough for a child.

This ingenuity in children’s language acquisition is fascinating, as the enormous feat of building up a world bit by bit, continually adding, replacing, and substituting happens every day without much thought. It’s absolutely mind-explosionfull.