This week's reading by Clark looked at the cognitive development steps that are taken by children vs adults in vocabulary development and language inherently. The Clark article did a study of around 48 children and looked at the development and comprehension of different words, i.e. stop vs stopper and similar words. Somehow there is an innate development that these children use to fill in words that they have not seen before. I thought it was fascinating that the study found three driving principles that helped these children, that is the principle of semantic transparency, productivity and conventionality.
I think it's crazy that children can figure out more complex word and linguistic comparisons to make more abstract comprehensions. I wonder if there's any relation between the study here about the development of the children's comprehension of new words, and the Carnie study article that we read at the beginning of the year. That article summarized a few points about generative grammar, which would inherently lead to sounds like "-er" and more complex grammatical creations.
I'd be interested in a real world context what a more 'conventional' word is (or more common). I have a feeling this might be more of an innate description. One other takeaway is the close relationship between the grammatical syntax of language and how that syntax better informs the meaning of certain words. I think before Ling 1, I thought of them as separate entities but the more I'm reading and learning in this class, the more I see how interconnected these two ideas of language and comprehension are.
This reading reminded of certain languages like chinese, latin and english and how these type of comparison words based on conventional ideas like the aforementioned "stop" vs "stopper" are formed. For example in Chinese, there is a similar idea for the words "wash" and "washer" where one of a verb and the other is a noun. Interestingly enough, these two words, although completely separate in meaning, use the same stem for the basic makeup (similar to retaining "wash" in English), which is awesome!
I'm curious to see if there are any cases, where this doesn't match up in other languages, i.e how languages evolved differently than perhaps English or Chinese did. Or maybe that's not even the right question to ask. Cool paper!
Hi Gavin,
ReplyDeleteI also found this article interesting. The idea that children can recognize these complex word-formation devices is surprising to me as well. I previously thought of language learning as a process where a person learns the new vocabulary words and thereby increases her knowledge of the language. This reading upended my view in a way similar to you. Children use complex mechanisms to deduce and create their own meanings.
Also, I agree with you about the ambiguous definition of a "conventional" word. How do we know if something is conventional? Is this just what each individual recognizes depending on what form of the language she has been exposed to? I'm not sure and I think the article would be better served if it defined how these conventional words are chosen.