Linguistic Sponges

I found the Clark reading this week quite interesting. According to the principle of transparency, it’s much easier to deal with one-to-one mappings of meanings to forms in creating and interpreting new words than it is with one-to-many or many-to-one mappings. This was also true for me as a child even outside of the “-er” example provided in this study. When I was young and had learned that the fluffy object in my grandmother’s house was called a “dog”, I only mapped my grandmother’s dog -> “dog”, and when I saw other dogs that looked different from my grandmother’s dog, I did not know to call those “dogs” also, failing to apply a one-to-many mapping of words to meanings. To connect this with the principle of conventionality, the word “dog”, I had to learn, was a conventional word to mean a dog. Like Clark mentions, however, I as a child was constantly updating my repertoire of vocabulary and word-formation devices to continuously change my implicit assumptions about the words and word-formation devices that are conventional. For instance, I learned that “dog” was the conventional word for dog and quickly updated my assumptions and repertoire accordingly. I think the idea of conventionality of words also interestingly relates back to the paper on triangles, where the “convention” of a triangle was a equilateral one. With regards to the principle of productivity, it seems that what this principle implies is that children are constantly on the watch for learning new generic “models” - what they do and what they mean, and while the repertoire of words and word-formation devices have not yet mature for children, they are eager to overgeneralize these new models, often in contexts that does not yield to proper grammar. However, I personally view this as a positive phenomenon because this demonstrates active learning by the children, and the fact that these mistakes are made often allows for the chance for these children to rapidly correct their mistakes and quickly grow. Overall, I view these three principles as valuable in providing reasonable explanations for the Clark study, and to providing insight into the way that children acquire word-formation devices.