This week’s reading by Eve Clark and Barbara Hecht, “Learning to coin agent and instrument nouns,” articulated a nuance in terms of understanding how children have developed control over the suffix -er in creating words to supplement gaps in the words they have in their vocabulary. Some key background research I found interesting included the observations that five- and seven-year-olds were unable to elicit the agent -er in the same proportion that adults utilize it. For example, when there were asked to created a noun form of zib, only 11% produced zibber, and others utilized zibbing-man or zib-man. This progression of improved use of the suffix -er is seen through older age up to the point where adults are able to utilize appropriately at a full rate. Therefore, this leads to a question regarding developmental psychology in such a way that I’m curious to know what occurs and is necessary to make the suffix -er available to individuals as children and/or adolescents to utilize -er as a word formation device.
This idea is interesting as in Symbolic Systems 1 this week, we learned the developmental psychology research on the Theory of Mind and so I’m curious to see observing this phenomenon through a lens of developmental psychology. In addition, through reading the Clark article, I became intrigued with the extremely flexible use of language. Their conclusion rests on this idea that individuals are able to fill in gaps in their vocabulary through constructing new word forms that are not yet learnt (Clark 22). In addition, the methods they utilize such as linking the new word to existing words they know such as using dog-house instead of a kennell. Overall, I think this research has implications for other suffixes that may change the word form and what that type of development says about our linguistic development as well.
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