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?