Children’s Innovative Verbs Versus Nouns: Structured Elicitations and Spontaneous Coinages

Abstract

This chapter concerns derivational morphology, a domain that was marginal to the Berko wug task (3 or 4 of nearly 30 production items). Yet the research reported here derives directly from this classic study because it, too, makes use of structured elicitation for evaluating children’s productive, rule-bound knowledge of morphological alternations. Two questions of principle serve as background to discussion of methodology in language acquisition research: how children construe nouns versus verbs as a universal linguistic contrast, and the impact on this process of language-particular factors in the acquisition of Hebrew as a first language. Findings from a structured elicitation task in which subjects coin new words from familiar lexical items are then compared with studies based on nonsense-words and with children’s spontaneous lexical coinages.

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