Eve V Clark
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 246531 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Eve V Clark |
| NOMBRES | Eve V |
| APELLIDO | Clark |
| FIRMA | CLARK E V |
| AFILIACIONES | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1122-3499 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 103 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1971 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Comprehension leads
Infants learn language in interaction. Comprehension gets established first, and this guides both interaction and later word production. They look at faces and hands, follow adult gaze, attend to voices and actions, react to these and start playing exchange games from 2 to 3 months on. They rely first on gestures and later add words to communicate. Both gesture and gaze accompany language use through adulthood. Face-to-face communication is multi…
Barbara F. Kelly and the study of children’s multimodal language socialization
Our contribution to the special issue in honour of Barb Kelly is a combination of personal reflections on her extraordinary life and work, discussion of her contributions to the study of gesture and other actions during young children’s early language learning, and exemplification of how that work is being built upon in a current research project in which Barb was to have been a Chief Investigator. The article draws on Eve’s experience as a membe…
Context-Dependent Learning of Linguistic Disjunction
What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing or between 18-30 months and by 42 months, their rate of production reached a plateau. Second, we ann…
A gradualist view of word meaning in language acquisition and language use
For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, …
Conversational Repair and the Acquisition of Language
In this article, I examine how repairs in adult-child conversations guide children’s acquisition of language. Children make unprompted self-repairs to their utterances. They also respond to prompts for repair, whether open (Hm?, What?) or restricted (You hid what?), and to restricted offers (Child: I falled, Adult: You fell?). Children respond to clarification requests with self-repairs in the next turn, and make use of the feedback offered. The …
Perspective-taking and pretend-play
Exposure and feedback in language acquisition
This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4–2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our findings show that: (a) children's early verbs were opaque with no clear inflectional target (e.g., t…
First Language Vocabulary Acquisition
Children produce their first words between the ages of one and one‐and‐a‐half. They add new words as they gain experience from interaction with adults who talk about new objects, draw attention to their properties, and link the new words to familiar ones the children already know.
Pragmatic inferences in context
Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as “It LOOKS like a zebra”, to derive a conversational implicature, namely [but it isn't one], as long as they can access a seman…
“ The moustache sits down first”
This study investigates preschoolers’ ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9–5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name animates metonymically on the basis of a salient property. Although children were outperformed by adults, …
First Language Acquisition
How do young children learn language? When does this process start? What does language acquisition involve? Children are exposed to language from birth, surrounded by knowledgeable speakers who offer feedback and provide extensive practice every day. Through conversation and joint activities, children master the language being used around them. This fully revised third edition of Eve V. Clark's bestselling textbook offers comprehensive coverage o…
Turn-taking, timing, and planning in early language acquisition
Young children answer questions with longer delays than adults do, and they don't reach typical adult response times until several years later. We hypothesized that this prolonged pattern of delay in children's timing results from competing demands: to give an answer, children must understand a question while simultaneously planning and initiating their response. Even as children get older and more efficient in this process, the demands on them i…
Early verb constructions in French
Children acquiring French elaborate their early verb constructions by adding adjacent morphemes incrementally at the left edge of core verbs. This hypothesis was tested with 2657 verb uses from four children between 1;3 and 2;7. Consistent with the Adjacency Hypothesis, children added clitic subjects first only to present tense forms (as in il saute ‘he jumps’); modals to infinitives (as in faut sauter ‘has to jump’); and auxiliaries to past part…
First Language Acquisition
Pragmatics in acquisition
Recent research has highlighted several areas where pragmatics plays a central role in the process of acquiring a first language. In talking with their children, adults display their uses of language in each context, and offer extensive feedback on form, meaning, and usage, within their conversational exchanges. These interactions depend critically on joint attention, physical co-presence, and conversational co-presence – essential factors that h…
First Language Vocabulary Acquisition
Children produce their first words anywhere between 12 months and 24 months of age. And they add steadily to their vocabulary from then on, at a rate estimated at around nine words a day up to age six (Clark, 2009).
Constructing verb paradigms in French
Using speech and gesture to introduce new objects to young children
Adults rely on both speech and gesture to provide children with information pertinent to new word meanings. Parents were videotaped introducing new objects to their children (aged 1;6 and 3;0). They introduce these objects in three phases: (1) they establish joint attention on an object; (2) they introduce a label for it; (3) they situate the object conceptually. Parents used labels and gestures to maintain attention on the object; with one-year-…
Adult offer, word-class, and child uptake in early lexical acquisition
How do adults offer new words from different parts of speech? This study examined the offers in book-reading interactions for 48 dyads (parents and children aged 2- to 5-years-old). The parents relied on fixed syntactic frames, final position, and emphatic stress to highlight unfamiliar words. As they talked to their children about the referent objects, events, or scenes, they also linked new words to other terms in the pertinent semantic domain,…
Children Build on Pragmatic Information in Language Acquisition
Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language. This can be seen in children's early communication, in t…
First Language Acquisition
Babies are not born talking, they learn language, starting immediately from birth. How does this process take place? When do children master the skills needed for using language successfully? What stages do they go through as they learn to understand and talk? Do the languages they learn affect the way they think? This edition of Eve Clark's highly successful textbook focuses on children's acquisition of a first language, the stages of developmen…
One vs. more than one
When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express 'more-than-one' in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore children's earliest expressions for 'more-than-one' by (a) examining longitudinal records for references to one vs. several objects, (b) eliciting references to pictures depicting …
Repetition as ratification
Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult–child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said. Analysis of 978 exchanges containing repetitions showed that adults use them to check on intentions …
Getting and maintaining attention in talk to young children
When two people talk about an object, they depend on joint attention, a prerequisite for setting up common ground in a conversational exchange. In this study, we analyze this process for parent and child, with data from 40 dyads, to show how adults initiate joint attention in talking to young children (mean ages 1 ; 6 and 3 ; 0). Adults first get their children's attention with a summons (e.g. Ready? , See this? ), but cease using such forms once…
Conventionality and contrast in language and language acquisition
Conventionality and contrast provide the pragmatic basis of language use for adults. These principles play a vital role in the process of acquiring a first language as children learn how to interact using language
When Nouns Surface as Verbs
People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to porch a newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by a convention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he ha…
Structure and Use in the Acquisition of Word Formation
Children, like adults, coin words to fill lexical gaps. To do this, children must build up a repertoire of word formation devices to use. This study examines the influence of semantico transparency, of formal simplicity, of productivity, and of conventionality on the acquisition of a repertoire of word formation devices by looking at the role of these principles in Hebrew-speaking children's coinages of novel agent and instrument nouns, and compa…
Young children's uptake of new words in conversation
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…
Coining complex compounds in English
Perspective-taking and pretend-play
Children Build on Pragmatic Information in Language Acquisition
Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language. This can be seen in children's early communication, in t…
The Notion of Source in Language Acquisition
When children describe an event, they do not always make use of the conventional means for marking oblique arguments. In early attempts at passive constructions, for example, children often mark oblique agents with from instead of conventional by , as in He isn't going to get hurt from those bad guys. They also make use of from instead of because , as in From I put it under there. Such uses of from typically appear prior to by and because for age…
Normal States and Evaluative Viewpoints
The deictic verbs come and go, as well as bring and send, may be used in idioms to refer to change of state rather than to motion. In such idiomatic uses, it is proposed, the deictic center, corresponding to the goal of come, is provided by some NORMAL STATE of being, e.g. consciousness or realism as in He came round and He came down to earth. In contrast, go marks departure from a normal state, as in He went mad and He went into a daze. Come is …
Constructing verb paradigms in French
A thrower-button or a button-thrower? Children's judgments of grammatical and ungrammatical compound nouns
A gradualist view of word meaning in language acquisition and language use
For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, …
Using speech and gesture to introduce new objects to young children
Adults rely on both speech and gesture to provide children with information pertinent to new word meanings. Parents were videotaped introducing new objects to their children (aged 1;6 and 3;0). They introduce these objects in three phases: (1) they establish joint attention on an object; (2) they introduce a label for it; (3) they situate the object conceptually. Parents used labels and gestures to maintain attention on the object; with one-year-…
One vs. more than one
When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express 'more-than-one' in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore children's earliest expressions for 'more-than-one' by (a) examining longitudinal records for references to one vs. several objects, (b) eliciting references to pictures depicting …
The Child's Path to Spoken Language
Speaker perspective in language acquisition
Psychology and Language
The Growth of Word Meaning
The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10
On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after
The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10
Non-linguistic strategies and the acquisition of word meanings
The Growth of Word Meaning
‘This man's father is my father's son’
Clark's (1973) hypothesis about the acquisition of semantics proposed that young children learn the meanings of words component by component, and that, within any given semantic field, they acquire the full adult meanings for the semantically simpler terms before they acquire the semantically more complex ones. The semantic field investigated in the present study was that of kinship terms. A new analysis of kin terms, employing relational compone…
Normal States and Evaluative Viewpoints
The deictic verbs come and go, as well as bring and send, may be used in idioms to refer to change of state rather than to motion. In such idiomatic uses, it is proposed, the deictic center, corresponding to the goal of come, is provided by some NORMAL STATE of being, e.g. consciousness or realism as in He came round and He came down to earth. In contrast, go marks departure from a normal state, as in He went mad and He went into a daze. Come is …
Psycholinguistics
Strategies in the acquisition of deixis
Although deictic terms are among the earliest words children acquire, the proximal/non-proximal contrast (the true deictic contrast) between here and there , and between this and that , takes several years to master. As research on spontaneous production shows, children may start, for example, by using here with a deictic meaning, there with a non-deictic meaning, and a gesture to indicate a deictic contrast. On the basis of two experiments on co…
When Nouns Surface as Verbs
People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to porch a newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by a convention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he ha…
Psychology and Language
Productivity and memory for newly formed words
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.…
Structure and Use in the Acquisition of Word Formation
Children, like adults, coin words to fill lexical gaps. To do this, children must build up a repertoire of word formation devices to use. This study examines the influence of semantico transparency, of formal simplicity, of productivity, and of conventionality on the acquisition of a repertoire of word formation devices by looking at the role of these principles in Hebrew-speaking children's coinages of novel agent and instrument nouns, and compa…
Compound Nouns and Category Structure in Young Children
Coining complex compounds in English
Types of linguistic knowledge
The present study examined the types of linguistic knowledge that affect children's ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew. Sixty children aged 3;0–9;0, and 12 adults, were asked to interpret and to produce novel Noun + Noun compounds. Their comprehension was in advance of their production. In comprehension, morphological form of head nouns had little effect: from age four, children did equally well on all the compound forms …
On the logic of contrast
The Principle of Contrast, that different words have different meanings, holds for adult language use. But at what age do children assume Contrast ? Do they rely on it from the start, or do they assume that new words may have the same meaning (the Null Hypothesis) until they discover otherwise ? Both the Null Hypothesis and Contrast have certain consequences. The Null Hypothesis places a heavy burden on languagelearners, whereas children could di…
A thrower-button or a button-thrower? Children's judgments of grammatical and ungrammatical compound nouns
On children's uses of from, by and with in oblique noun phrases
This study was designed to follow up children's early spontaneous uses of from to mark oblique agents by giving 40 children (aged 2; 5–6; 1), and 10 adults, grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing from, with , and by to imitate and to repair. As predicted, children's imitations and repairs showed that ( a ) 2–year-olds produce from for agents, and with for instruments in imitation; and ( b ) as children get older, they shift to by for …
Learning to use compounds for contrast
This study investigated children's ability to produce compounds by asking them to label contrasting subcategories (e.g., tea-pot vs coffee- pot) as distinct from generic categories (e.g. pot, chair). Sixty Hebrew- speaking children, aged 2;0 to 7;4, and 12 adults, answered three questions about each of a series of picture-sets. The first question checked their ability to understand novel compound (noun-noun) labels for a subcategory, and everyone…
The Notion of Source in Language Acquisition
When children describe an event, they do not always make use of the conventional means for marking oblique arguments. In early attempts at passive constructions, for example, children often mark oblique agents with from instead of conventional by , as in He isn't going to get hurt from those bad guys. They also make use of from instead of because , as in From I put it under there. Such uses of from typically appear prior to by and because for age…
On the pragmatics of contrast
In this paper, I review properties and consequences of the PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST. This principle, which I have argued from the beginning has a pragmatic basis, captures facts about the inferences speakers and addressees make for both conventional and novel words. Along with a PRINCIPLE OF CONVENTIONALITY, it accounts for the pre-emption of novel words by well-established ones. And it holds just as much for morphology as it does for words and larg…
Speaker perspective in language acquisition
Speaker perspective and lexical acquisition
The Lexicon in Acquisition
Without words, children can't talk about people, places, things, actions, relations, or states, and they have no grammatical rules. Without words, there would be no sound structure, no word structure, and no syntax. The lexicon is central in language, and in language acquisition. Eve Clark argues for this centrality and for the general principles of conventionality and contrast at the core of language acquisition. She looks at the hypotheses chil…
Speaker Perspective and Lexical Acquisition
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)
Linguistics (54 obras) · Psychology (53 obras) · Philosophy (35 obras) · Computer Science (32 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (29 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (20 obras) · Cognitive psychology (19 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (18 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (17 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (15 obras)