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Young children's uptake of new words in conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2007

EVE V. CLARK
EVE V. CLARK
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg 460, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2150, [email protected]
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Abstract

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 9% of the time, or made a relevant move-on by alluding to some aspect of its referent, again in the next turn, 38% of the time. By comparison, the repeat-rate in new-to-given shifts in conversation is significantly lower. The present data provide strong evidence for some immediate uptake. When children register that new words are new, they can assign them some preliminary meaning and begin to use them right away from as young as age two.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR97-31781), the Spencer Foundation (199900133), and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. I am indebted to Andrew D-W. Wong for help with the data analysis, to Karin Kastens for locating elusive articles, and to Bruno Estigarribia, Barbara F. Kelly, David A. McKercher, and Edy Veneziano for discussion and comment.

Keywords

language acquisitionnew wordsuptakerepetitionconversation
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 157 - 182
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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