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Productivity and memory for newly formed words*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Eve V. Clark  and
Sophia R. Cohen
Eve V. Clark
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Sophia R. Cohen
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

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 most productive suffix (-er) well and its less productive companions (-ist and -ian) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive -ly (about equal in frequency to -er) together with -ist and -ian, did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including -er) for the non-agentive -ly, with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , October 1984 , pp. 611 - 625
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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