Children and adult second-language learners

Clark and Hecht’s article claimed that children have to build up a repertoire of words and “word-formation devices.” It goes on to say that “The repertoires that result will not necessarily conform to adult usage. Children also have to take into account the conventional words for expressing particular meanings - words that may become known to them only after they have devised a word-form of their own invention to express some meaning.” 

After reading this paragraph, I immediately correlated children’s language-learning process with adult’s second-language learning process. For example, just like children have very small vocabularies and therefore have to work with what they do have, learners of a second language also start out with a small vocabulary, and so they also must essentially create sentences using only what vocabulary they possess. As a result, both children and older second-language learners essentially either coin phrases or use whatever word is most appropriate in their limited vocabulary to try to fill a lexical gap. 

However, as Clark and Hecht state, the problem with this is that the language that language-learners use is not necessarily conventional and also they might not learn the conventional words for expressing particular meanings until after they have created a word-form of their own that is unconventional.

This fact that both children and adult second-language learners have to coin new phrases and do not always start out knowing the conventional words for expressing a thought reminded me of my own experience in learning Chinese. There have been innumerable times in which I have had to use a word or phrase that merely conveys the general idea of what I am trying to express but is not the conventional way of stating that idea because my vocabulary is so limited (just like a child’s). 

Just one example of this occurred recently. I did not know the proper Chinese phrase to ask, “What is the tone of this word?” (Chinese is a tonal language with four possible tones per word). With my limited vocabulary and lack of knowledge of the conventional way to ask this question, I thought something like “这个词有什么声调?” was the way to ask this question. However, when I asked my Chinese teacher how to properly/conventionally ask this question, she said the conventional way is actually, “这个词有第几声?” In short, I had devised my own way of asking this question because I had no knowledge of the proper words to use, so I essentially “coined” my own phrase to fill a lexical gap. However, my teacher said my sentence was not correct because it was not the conventional way Chinese people ask this question.

So, through reading this paper, I realized that "incorrect" therefore means "unconventional." 

In fact, I remember a time in Chinese class when a student was having trouble expressing something and then my Chinese teacher told that student to “just try to use the the Chinese that you know.” 

So in Clark and Hecht’s paper, I saw a big correlation between children’s language acquisition and their necessity of coining new phrases that are unfortunately unconventional and adult’s second-language acquisition and their coining of new phrases that are also unconventional, both due to limited vocabulary.