Author
Abstract
Having not acquired or retrieved any words for the intended
concept, in the process of mother tongue acquisition, children
sometimes try to innovate new words in dealing with the problem.
This study empirically investigates these innovations in preschool
years. The data include 60 words innovated by a female native
speaker of Persian (2.6 trough 5.0). The result shows that she made
use of 7 morphological processes to coin the words and regarding
these innovations, adjective and compounding are the most frequent
grammatical categories and morphological processes respectively.
But the first morphological process used by the child is derivation
through suffix "-i", the most productive Persian suffix. This result
does not support Clark's findings since she says that the most
productive process is the first one which children use to make their
own new words.
Keywords: lexical innovation, acquisition of morphological
processes, first language acquisition, compounding and derivation,
psycholinguistics
Keywords
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