Structure and Use in the Acquisition of Word Formation

Clark, Eve V.; Berman, Ruth A.

doi:10.2307/413991

Cited by 130 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

109

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Dressler (2005), and consider that the acquisition of derivational morphology is an important step in mastering the complexity of lexical items (see also Schipke, Kauschke 2011). This process is interrelated with the issue of lexical knowledge as well as of lexical categories, since the central functions of derivation are change of meaning and transposition of word classes (Clark, Berman 1984, Ravid 2004. The cross-linguistic differences are expected to be considerable, being dependent on the role of derivation in the different languages (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

Argus

Kazakovskaya

2018

ERYa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Acquisition of derivation is not a well-studied area in first language research and a comparative approach to the acquisition of derivation in different languages doesn't exist. There is no information on how a child acquires derivation in a language with a rich and regular system of derivational patterns, or in a language where derivation is productive, but the system of derivational patterns is opaque. According to general ideas of complexity in a language, the child should start to use simplex stems first and, only after that, complex ones, that is, complexity should increase in the course of acquisition. Our paper is intended to address these issues, based on longitudinal child data from typologically different languages, Estonian and Russian. The results revealed significant differences in the acquisition of noun derivation in the two languages under observation. The system of noun derivation is acquired at a faster pace in Russian, while Estonian children have far fewer noun derivatives in their speech and they use different derivation suffixes with less regularity. Even so, the so-called building block model may be applied for both languages only partially.*

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

Argus

Kazakovskaya

2018

ERYa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…10 The idea that Personal Agent occupies a more central position in the conceptual category Agent than Instrument is also confirmed by the facts of language acquisition. Clark and Hecht (1982) stress the primacy of Personal Agent with respect to Instrument in the acquisition of English -er nouns. This primacy is nicely illustrated by the following dialogue mentioned in their paper: Clark and Hecht (1982) also found that if a child used -er consistently for only one of its meanings, the majority used it consistently in its agent interpretation.…”

Section: Agents and Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Clark and Hecht (1982) stress the primacy of Personal Agent with respect to Instrument in the acquisition of English -er nouns. This primacy is nicely illustrated by the following dialogue mentioned in their paper: Clark and Hecht (1982) also found that if a child used -er consistently for only one of its meanings, the majority used it consistently in its agent interpretation. Interestingly, the primacy of Personal Agent with respect to Instrument was also found by Clark and Berman (1984: 582-583) in their investigation of the acquisition of Hebrew morphology: 'In summary, coinages for agents and instruments suggest that speakers conceive of these two lexical classes as belonging to a single category, in which agents are more central than instruments'.…”

Section: Agents and Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Form and meaning in morphology: the case of Dutch ‘agent nouns’

Booij¹

1986

Linguistics

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

* Some morphologists have proposed the separation of form and meaning in morphology because of the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between them. In this paper it is shown that this position is ill-advised since it impedes a deeper insight into the systematics of the interpretation of complex words.This is demonstrated by a detailed study of one affix, the déverbal suffix -er in Dutch, which creates subject names. The apparent polysemy of this suffix appears to follow from independent, nonlinguistic principles.

show abstract

“…In this article, language learning is viewed from the perspective of comprehension, which usually occurs before word production in typical development (e.g., Benedict, 1979;Clark & Berman, 1984), in language delay (Gibson & Ingram, 1983), and in apes (Savage-Rumbaugh, McDonald, Sevcik, Hopkins, & Rubert, 1986). In particular, I focus on learning names for things.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants Can Learn Decontextualized Words Before Their First Birthday

Schafer

2005

Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can infants below age 1 year learn words in one context and understand them in another? To investigate this question, two groups of parents trained infants from age 9 months on 8 categories of common objects. A control group received no training. At 12 months, infants in the experimental groups, but not in the control group, showed comprehension of the words in a new context. It appears that infants under 1 year old can learn words in a decontextualized, as distinct from a context‐bound, fashion. Perceptual variability within the to‐be‐learned categories, and the perceptual similarity between training sets and the novel test items, did not appear to affect this learning.

show abstract

Structure and Use in the Acquisition of Word Formation

Cited by 130 publications

References 21 publications

Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

Acquisition of noun derivation in Estonian and Russian L1

Form and meaning in morphology: the case of Dutch ‘agent nouns’

Infants Can Learn Decontextualized Words Before Their First Birthday

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About