Children Language Acquisition

This week’s reading shed light on how children acquire language: a topic I’ve been particularly interested in since we discussed Universal Grammar in class. The Clark and Hecht reading explores the process of children learning how to formulate words for meanings they don’t have a specific word. As stated in the studies, in order to produce words, children follow three main principles.

According to the first principle semantic transparency, children tend to match a single word with a single meaning - in order to express a new meaning and create a new word, this principle guides children to use words they are already familiar with. The second principle of productivity states that children pick up on “word formation devices used most often by adults in word innovations” in order to convey particular meanings like -er. The third and final principle of conventionality states that there is a  “conventional word or word-formation device” for certain meanings that should be used and thus, drives children to use conventional forms when they are learned, instead of other forms they might have used before learning the conventional form.

The paper focused on the suffix -er and its use in the construction of agent and instrument word forms. It also discusses the finesse of language that is expected at various ages for children. According to the reading, children only really start to coin their own agent and instrument nouns around the ages of five to seven; however, they seem to demonstrate some sort of basal understanding and knowledge even at the mere age of two. The reading states that this ability is only mastered by children who are around the ages of ten to twelve.

While I was reading the paper and trying to grasp the process of language acquisition for children, I couldn’t help but relate every step of this process as described in the paper to the real-life example in my life of my cousin learning language. It intrigues me how each child learns language at a different rate; I started speaking full sentences like “happy birthday to you” before I was even one, but my cousin did not even speak broken sentences until he was around one and a half years old. I wonder what environmental, or perhaps even genetic, factors affect our ability to follow the three main word production principles as stated above. I also am really interested to see how the language acquisition process differs for different languages, as a bilingual.