Eve V Clark

Stanford University | SU · Department of Linguistics

By age 5, children readily understand, produce, and interact with language. In their first year, they attend to sounds and sound sequences, and a few words. Next, they communicate with gestures and words, adding words to memory for recognition and for targets in production. By age 2, they produce word-combinations, adding complexity with inflection...

What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing...

Children acquiring English and French do not initially produce any subjects with the verbs that appear in their early two-word utterances. Instead, in both languages children depend heavily on the communicative context for interpretation of what they are trying to say. But they appear to realise early on that subjects are required in these language...

For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identic...

In this article, I examine how repairs in adult-child conversations guide children’s acquisition of language. Children make unprompted self-repairs to their utterances. They also respond to prompts for repair, whether open (Hm?, What?) or restricted (You hid what?), and to restricted offers (Child: I falled, Adult: You fell?). Children respond to c...

At what point do children move from literal uses of language to figurative ones, making use of metonymy and metaphor, for example? In this paper, I explore the contributions of perspective-taking and pretend-play as precursors to the emergence of figurative language in children. Speakers mark conceptual perspective with lexical choices to indicate...

Children produce their first words between the ages of one and one‐and‐a‐half. They add new words as they gain experience from interaction with adults who talk about new objects, draw attention to their properties, and link the new words to familiar ones the children already know.

This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4–2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our f...

As children accumulate words, they build up semantic domains. In doing this, they start to link the meanings of words, depending on how they are related to each other. They rely on conceptual representations of objects and events, and on how adults talk about objects and events. Adults typically provide information along with new-word offers: facts...

Both universal and language-specific meanings play a role as children map semantic categories onto linguistic forms in a first language. What sources do they draw from as they do this mapping? To what extent are their semantic categories informed by universal conceptual categories, and to what extent by the conventions of the language community? In...

Children acquire language in conversation. This is where they are exposed to the community language by more expert speakers. This exposure is effectively governed by adult reliance on pragmatic principles in conversation: Cooperation, Conventionality, and Contrast. All three play a central role in speakers’ use of language for communication in conv...

Children typically begin to say their first words between twelve and twenty months of age. And they produce systematic morphological modulations of those words within their first year of talking. As they move to more complex expression of their meanings, they add grammatical morphemes – prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, postpositions, and clitics....

Children interact with others from early in infancy: They smile in response to smiles, follow adult gaze, attend to objects others are looking at, mimic adult intonation contours in their babbling, and make use of gestures and actions to attract attention. They interact more intensively as they advance from crawling to walking. When they begin to t...

Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as "It LOOKS like a zebra", t...

Cambridge Core - Developmental Psychology - First Language Acquisition - by Eve V. Clark

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animat...

Young children answer questions with longer delays than adults do, and they don't reach typical adult response times until several years later. We hypothesized that this prolonged pattern of delay in children's timing results from competing demands: to give an answer, children must understand a question while simultaneously planning and initiating...

Children acquiring French elaborate their early verb constructions by adding adjacent morphemes incrementally at the left edge of core verbs. This hypothesis was tested with 2657 verb uses from four children between 1;3 and 2;7. Consistent with the Adjacency Hypothesis, children added clitic subjects first only to present tense forms (as in il saut...

When young children answer questions, they do so more slowly than adults and appear to have difficulty finding the appropriate words. Because children leave gaps before they respond, it is possible that they could answer faster with gestures than with words. In this study, we compare gestural and verbal responses from one child between the ages of...

This handbook aims at offering an authoritative and state-of-the art survey of current approaches to the analysis of human languages, serving as a source of reference for scholars and graduate students. The main objective of the handbook is to provide the reader with a convenient means of comparing and evaluating the main approaches that exist in c...

Where does common ground come from? When do infants and young children start to make use of common ground as they communicate? How do they assess what their interlocutor knows? And how do they mark information as given (in common ground) vs. new (to be added to common ground)? These are some of the questions addressed in the present chapter. Common...

This handbook is intended as a companion volume to the Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP, 2009), aiming to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. It examines theoretical and definitional matters, formal and semantic issues, interdisciplinary connections and detailed descriptions of derivational proc...

ABSTRACT Recent research has highlighted several areas where pragmatics plays a central role in the process of acquiring a first language. In talking with their children, adults display their uses of language in each context, and offer extensive feedback on form, meaning, and usage, within their conversational exchanges. These interactions depend c...

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)

Children produce their first words anywhere between 12 months and 24 months of age. And they add steadily to their vocabulary from then on, at a rate estimated at around nine words a day up to age six (Clark, 2009). Keywords: first language acquisition; pragmatics; interactionist language studies; vocabulary

Children acquiring French at first use just one form of each verb, where the meaning identifies only the event-type. How and when do they add additional forms, with the appropriate meanings? In this paper, we explore the information available to children from adult reformulations of these early verb-form uses, and show how adult construals contribu...

Adults rely on both speech and gesture to provide children with information pertinent to new word meanings. Parents were videotaped introducing new objects to their children (aged 1;6 and 3;0). They introduce these objects in three phases: (1) they establish joint attention on an object; (2) they introduce a label for it; (3) they situate the objec...

Adult production is influenced by the larger linguistic contexts in which words appear. Children, like adults, hear words in recurring linguistic contexts, but little is known on the effect of that context on their speech. We look at the production of irregular plurals in English (e.g., mice, feet) to argue that children attend to the larger phrase...

Adult production is influenced by the larger linguistic contexts in which words appear. Children, like adults, hear words in recurring linguistic contexts, but little is known on the effect of that context on their speech. We look at the production of irregular plurals in English (e.g., mice, feet) to argue that children attend to the larger phrase...

When children acquire verbs, they must not only identify the core meaning of each verb, but also discover that a verb meaning can be modulated by the addition of inflections and grammatical morphemes to express such features as tense, aspect, number, and person. In this paper, we report on early stages in the process of verb acquisition in four chi...

In order to use verbs in an adult-like manner, children, depending on the language they are learning, need to know several inter-related pieces of knowledge: their core meaning; that verbs can take different forms and how the meanings of those forms contrast with each other; which meaning dimensions are added by inflection (e.g., person, number, as...

How do adults offer new words from different parts of speech? This study examined the offers in book-reading interactions for 48 dyads (parents and children aged 2- to 5-years-old). The parents relied on fixed syntactic frames, final position, and emphatic stress to highlight unfamiliar words. As they talked to their children about the referent obj...

Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence bot...

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to Wx its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers—the experts—and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, Wx the reference of each one,...

When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express 'more-than-one' in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore children's earliest expressions for 'more-than-one' by (a) examining longitudina...

Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult-child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said....

Joint AttentionCommon GroundConvention and ContrastSpeech ActsSpeaker IntentionsTaking Account of the AddresseeTaking TurnsPolitenessConclusion

When two people talk about an object, they depend on joint attention, a prerequisite for setting up common ground in a conversational exchange. In this study, we analyze this process for parent and child, with data from 40 dyads, to show how adults initiate joint attention in talking to young children (mean ages 1;6 and 3;0). Adults first get their...

When offered unfamiliar words, do children attend to them? Examination of 701 offers of new words drawn from the longitudinal records of five children provides extensive evidence of attention to the new words: Children repeated the new word in the next turn 54% of the time; they acknowledged it in the next turn with markers like yeah or uh-huh...

Conventionality and contrast provide the pragmatic basis of language use for adults. These principles play a vital role in the process of acquiring a first language as children learn how to interact using language.

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to fix its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers--the experts--and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, fix the reference of each...

In early language acquisition, adults offer many new words and constructions. Children take up these offers. To signal that they have noticed new words, they often repeat them, either on their own (singleword utterances) or incorporated into their next utterance. This paper explores some specific Junctions of repetition in acquisition - for adults,...

In early language acquisition, adults offer many new words and constructions. Children take up these offers. To signal that they have noticed new words, they often repeat them, either on their own (singleword utterances) or incorporated into their next utterance. This paper explores some specific functions of repetition in acquisition - for adults,...

Both universal and language-specific meanings play a role as children map semantic categories onto linguistic forms in a first language. Child-directed speech is critical in helping children construct and shape their lexical semantic categories apart from their conceptual categories. Child-directed speech is the initial source of the conventions fo...

When children acquire a first language, they build on what they know--conceptual information that discriminates and helps create categories for the objects, relations and events they experience. This provides the starting point for language from the age of 12 months on. So children first set up conceptual representations, then add linguistic repres...

Parents frequently check up on what their children mean. They often do this by reformulating with a side sequence or an embedded correction what they think their children said. These reformulations effectively provide children with the conventional form for that meaning. Since the child's utterance and the adult reformulation differ while the inten...

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasio...

Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development. At first sight, advances in the two areas seem to have moved in opposing directions: the...

MICHAEL TOMASELLO (ed.), The new psychology of language: cognitive and functional approaches to language structure. Mahwah, New Jersey, & London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Pp. xxiii+292. ISBN 0-8058-2576-2. - - Volume 27 Issue 1 - EVE V. CLARK

The present study presents a preliminary report from a larger project examining the role of adult reformulations of children's utterances. Adult reformulations appear to serve two roles simultaneously in adult-child conversations: they provide a means whereby adult speakers can check up on what a child meant by what he said, and they offer a conven...

Children readily take up new words they hear in the course of conversation, and they substitute these, when necessary, for the words they began with. Adults also offer them pragmatic directions about how to relate such terms to familiar words (is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, looks like, etc.). In short, children aged 2;0 and younger can and...

The present study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two use what adults tell them about meaning relations when they make inferences about new words. 18 two-year-olds (mean age 2;2) and 18 three-year-olds (mean age 3;2) learned two new terms (a) with instructions either (i) to treat one term as a superordinate to the other, or (ii) to...

Eve Clarck, Lexicon and syntax in the acquisition of French When children acquire a language, they learn both word meanings and construction meanings. For each word, they first produce subsets of possible combinations of a specific verb and some possible direct objects, say, or of another verb and some possible subjects. These early combinations le...

Adult speakers choose among perspectives when they talk, with different words picking out different perspectives (e.g., the dog, our pet, that animal). The many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire, and, therefore, from the first, readily apply mu...

When speakers choose a word, they choose the perspective from which they wish to present an entity or an event. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that young children accept multiple perspectives from an early age. That is, they know that two terms can refer to the same entity, as shown by their comprehension and production of multiple t...

When speakers choose a word, they choose the perspective from which they wish to present an entity or an event. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that young children accept multiple perspectives from an early age. That is, they know that two terms can refer to the same entity, as shown by their comprehension and production of multiple t...

General lexical development in children, including extensive studies of word-formation

argue . . . that lexical and syntactic development go hand in hand / children learn the syntactic forms that go with specific lexical items, and gradually accumulate sets of words that can act the same way syntactically / focuses . . . on the acquisition of the lexicon and of individual lexical items, how children build up a vocabulary (isolating f...

This chapter deals with language acquisition, in which, the lexicon and syntax are intertwined. Syntax in children's language emerges as part and parcel of their lexical knowledge. Each word carries with it a specification not only of its meaning but also its syntax—the range of constructions in which it can occur. Children learn not only the meani...

The purpose of these studies is to characterize children's conception of reversal and its relation to a reference state. A reversal is the move from one state to some prior state of affairs. For example, shoes that have been TIED can be UNTIED, parcels WRAPPED then UNWRAPPED, and dishes COVERED then UNCOVERED. The present studies were designed to f...

Without words, children can't talk about people, places, things, actions, relations, or states, and they have no grammatical rules. Without words, there would be no sound structure, no word structure, and no syntax. The lexicon is central in language, and in language acquisition. Eve Clark argues for this centrality and for the general principles o...

A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words...

In this paper, I review properties and consequences of the PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST. This principle, which I have argued from the beginning has a pragmatic basis, captures facts about the inferences speakers and addresses make for both conventional and novel words. Along with a PRINCIPLE OF CONVENTIONALITY, it accounts for the pre-emption of novel wor...

This study investigated children's ability to produce compounds by asking them to label contrasting subcategories (e.g., tea-pot vs coffee- pot) as distinct from generic categories (e.g. pot, chair). Sixty Hebrew- speaking children, aged 2;0 to 7;4, and 12 adults, answered three questions about each of a series of picture-sets. The first question c...

Linguistic form and conceptual level both play a role in the structure of adult lexical hierarchies. The present studies examined how these factors might affect acquisition. In their linguistic form, labels can be single nouns (e.g., oak) or compound nouns (e.g., oak-tree). In conceptual level, categories can be structured at the basic (e.g., tree)...

This study was designed to follow up children's early spontaneous uses of from to mark oblique agents by giving 40 children (aged 2;5-6;1), and 10 adults, grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing from, with, and by to imitate and to repair. As predicted, children's imitations and repairs showed that (a) 2-year-olds produce from for agents...

When children describe an event, they do not always make use of the conventional means for marking oblique arguments. In early attempts at passive constructions, for example, children often mark oblique agents with from instead of conventional by, as in He isn't going to get hurt from those bad guys. They also make use of from instead of because, a...

The Principle of Contrast, that different words have different meanings, holds for adult language use. But at what age do children assume Contrast ? Do they rely on it from the start, or do they assume that new words may have the same meaning (the Null Hypothesis) until they discover otherwise ? Both the Null Hypothesis and Contrast have certain co...

This study looked at children's judgments of compound nouns. Forty-eight children, aged 3;5 to 6;0, were asked to judge grammatical and ungrammatical compounds (such as wagon-puller and puller-wagon) for their appropriateness in conveying particular meanings. Children at all ages judged grammatical compounds as acceptable, but only as they got olde...

The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form...

Are 2-year-olds subcategorizing when they coin novel compounds such as car-smoke ("exhaust") and house-smoke ("smoke from a chimney")? In 2 experiments, 96 children (and 8 adults) were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife (a kind of knife connected with apples), or were asked to label objects namea...

Für den Erwerß des Wortschatzes sind zwei wichtige Prinzipien maßgebend. Das erste nenne ich das Prinzip der Konventionalität. Es geht davon aus, daß Wörter eine konventionelle Bedeutung besitzen. Das zweite Prinzip nenne ich das Prinzip des Kontrasts. Es beinhaltet, daß Wörter mehrere verschiedene Bedeutungen haben. Dies läßt sich anhand des folge...

The first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the mo...