The Clark paper discusses how children learn how to make new words. Clark argues that there are three principles that guide children in their acquisition of new words: the principle of semantic transparency, which gives priority to familiar words when making new words and the use of one word for one meaning; the principle of productivity, which allows children to identify more specialized word-formation devices to convey certain meanings; and the principle of conventionality, which gives priority to conventional forms of words over those created by the child.
Clark begins with with examples of how children of different ages respond to tasks in which they need to create a new ‘-er’ word from a nonsense word. Based on their age, children respond in different ways. They do not respond in an adult-like way until around the ages of 10-12, by -er as an agent or instrumental suffix. Before this age, children have more basic ways of creating words, firstly by compounding. Initially, children rely create new compound words to convey meaning instead of creating new words through use of suffixes and affixes. This can be seen in the example given, ‘dog-house’, as the word used by younger children to convey the meaning of a ‘kennel’. At an early age, individual words are added to each other to convey a desired meaning.
In relation to the -er suffix, children first observe this construction in agent nouns, and thus utilize it themselves in agent nouns before moving on to other types of words that share this suffix, such as instrumental nouns.
Even though children seem to use their own made-up words to convey certain meanings, they seem to follow a principle that causes them to trade these made-up words for conventionally used words that convey the same meaning. They listen to adults and learn from them, quickly realizing which words are commonly used and adopting and substituting them into their own acquired language.
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