The Acquisition of New Words

This weeks reading looked at how children form words to describe agents and instruments not already in their vocabulary. It looked primarily at how these children formed words to explain these ideas, through the use of compound words, by adding the suffix -er, or by using a separate vocabulary word for an object or person who does, or is capable of doing that action. It showed that as children grow older, they begin to use the suffix -er more, with agents more than instruments, while younger children tend to compound words like: bite-thing, or build-man.
This once again goes to show just how complicated a language like English is very complicated, and lots of parts of it are not intuitive or innate and must be learned by convention. It is particularly interesting to look at this in light of the fact that with German this same acquisition happens much earlier, at the ages of two to three. This tells us something about the differences between these languages. Going back to the discussion of innate language, this goes to show that while parts of language may be innate, obviously there is significant parts that are not, and the methods we have to acquire these must be affected by the spoken language to explain the differences between the English and German rate of acquisition of this particular concept in children.
It would also be interesting to see how this impacts someone who is learning another language, or someone learning English as second or further language as not all languages operate on this basis. Would this be more difficult a concept to acquire or would it be faster than children?