Learning How To Make Words

The crux of this reading focused on how we identify words and their meanings and how we create words to fill gaps in our knowledge of how to express things. There are certain formulations in the English language, that, when placed together, can create new words and meanings. Hecht and Clark discuss how children acquire these skills. They explore one acquisition in particular—how children recognize the meaning of nouns that end in er.

Er can end two types of nouns, instrument and agent nouns. For instance, the agent form of an er noun might be caretaker. In contrast, the instrument form of an er noun might be typewriter, referring to the physical machine. Hecht and Clark state that younger children have difficulty distinguishing the meaning between the two. This introduces the question of how children acquire word-formation devices.

This is an interesting question to me because I hadn’t even considered how children develop their language skills in that context. When I thought about how people learned a language, I assumed this just meant understanding the meanings of an increasing number of words and their syntax. But this article made me realize that language acquisition is not just about learning vocabulary words, but also learning the components of these words. In this way, if a native speaker does not know the exact word in a given context, she can rely on the word construction devices she has intuitive knowledge of.

The article introduces the concepts of semantic transparency and productivity to describe how children acquire these word-formation devices. Semantic transparency refers to the desire of the speaker to construct a word with clear parts. In this way, the parts of the whole do not obscure the meaning of the word. One such example is dog-house. The meaning of both dog and house is clear. Productivity refers to the frequency of these devices in speech. Once a child hears er multiple times, it becomes transparent in its meaning.

Hecht and Clark illustrate, through their study, that children acquire the agent er noun first before moving to the instrument er noun. Younger children were better able to recognize the agent than the instrument. When asked to construct their own nouns, they used the er suffix primarily in the agent context.

Building upon this, Hecht and Clark introduce the idea of conventionality. Though children may use word-formation devices as they begin learning the language, if these words are ungrammatical, they are replaced by the conventional, accepted words. Thus, these techniques for creating words represent a transition period in language development until the language learners acquire other conventional words.