clark comments on lexical structure

Lexical structure within word groups – the CDI groups words by semantic domain, so its design builds in part on the many early diary studies that revealed strong similarities across languages in the nature of the first 50+ words (see, e.g., Clark 1973 in Moore). Another important source for a number of these early words is what are considered to be baby talk words in various languages. Aside from their phonetic properties (they are considered easier to say for one-year-olds, by adults—although this is a highly language-specific belief, and quite inconsistent phonetically across languages!), parents in different cultures show considerable agreement on the domains of words that belong in this register (see Ferguson 1964, 1977).

Otherwise, the word lists don’t include enough items within any one domain to reveal whether children understand any of the semantic relations that hold among them (hierarchical, say, or the various relations connecting objects with neighbours, with associated actions, sounds, habitat, etc.), nor do they reveal anything about the markedness relations that hold, for example, for terms that are opposites of some kind (see Greenberg, 1966). But one thing that happens is that children build up more and more complex domains (semantic fields) of words, with interrelated meanings, as their vocabularies expand (Clark 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 2018a). This is something that requires going beyond the CDI, but it’s a critical aspect of how the lexicon of a language eventually offers a map of conceptual and cultural/social knowledge for language users. I also had one question about Chapter 8, Figure 8.4: what about looking at this by language type, to see whether the general ordering is similar, say, within Germanic (and also within Scandinavian) vs. within Romance languages?

This is also directly relevant to how children attach some meaning to unfamiliar words. And in relation to Chapter 10, aside from the various kinds of experimental studies of word learning, analyses of natural conversations with children have shown that adults offer all kinds of information about how words are related to each other in meaning when they make an explicit offer to a young child of a new word, or when they offer feedback on a child’s word uses (e.g., Clark & Wong 2002; Clark 2007, 2010; Clark & Estigarribia 2011). Again studies of interaction here point to another drawback of CDI data: this kind of information cannot be extracted from it.

The detailed analysis of the ‘noun bias’ in Chapter 11 offers a useful perspective, and I wonder whether you might want to add a little more emphasis on the motor component of speech production. Dromi (1987) presented a very rigorous account of her daughter’s difficult progress from first trying a word to only producing it in recognizable form some weeks later (she made recordings and detailed transcripts). This I compared to my own (phonetically transcribed) diary data where D’s words were often recognizable from the start (Clark 1993). And there is quite extensive work on fine motor skills as they emerge in development by people like Esther Thelen. That is, children who take longer to develop fine motor control have a harder time with speech production in the early stages of acquisition, and this very likely delays the onset of word combination. (Dromi’s daughter only began to combine words a couple of weeks after she became able to produce new single words in recognizable form more-or-less on her first attempt.)

langcog / wordbank-book

clark comments on lexical structure #63