Children’s speech innovations

Abstract

The difference between children’s and adults’ speech consists in unusual lexemes or forms of familiar words as well as non-standard meanings of common words occurring in the former. The term error is not appropriate for such cases since these are legitimate elements of the child’s emerging language system. Despite their uniqueness, they do not hinder children’s communication with grown-ups. These units violating the linguistic norm are called innovations. The analysis of children’s innovations enables linguists to explore the nature of language rules and their hierarchical structure as well as to identify accidental gaps (or lacunae) in the language. The article presents a typology of children’s speech innovations from the standpoint of the language norm.