Eve V. Clark facts for kids

Eve Vivienne Clark (born 26 July 1942) is a smart British-American linguist. A linguist is someone who studies language. Eve Clark's main research looks at how children learn their first language. She especially studies how kids learn what words mean. She also explores how children learn to make new words. This includes comparing how English and Hebrew speakers, both kids and adults, form words. Some of her work shows how children learn the right way to say things. They learn this from how adults respond when they make mistakes.

What is Eve Clark's Background?

Eve Clark earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1969. She studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. After that, she worked on a big language project at Stanford University. Later, she joined the Linguistics Department at Stanford University. She is now a retired professor there, known as the Richard Lyman Professor emerita in the Humanities.

What Awards Has Eve Clark Won?

Eve Clark has received many important awards for her work. These awards show how much her research has helped us understand language.

• She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1979).
• She received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). This is a special award for people doing important research.
• She became a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1991.
• She was an invited speaker for the Linguistic Society of America's first Public Lectures on Language (2017).
• She was chosen as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2003).
• She became a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) (2007).
• She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
• She won the Roger Brown Award from the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) (2020/2021).

What Does Eve Clark Research?

Eve Clark's research mainly focuses on how children learn their first language. She studies how they learn the meaning of words. She also looks at how children and adults form new words. Her work explores different issues in how we use words and language. She has done many studies by watching children and by setting up experiments. Some of her most interesting studies show how important it is for children to talk with adults. These talks help young children develop their language skills. She has also studied how people create new words in everyday talk.

How Do Young Children Learn New Words?

Eve Clark wanted to know how children learn new words they haven't heard before. In 2007, she looked at words and conversations from five different "corpora." A corpus is a large collection of written or spoken texts. She thought that children repeat new words to help them learn. So, she predicted that children would repeat new words more often than words they already knew.

To test this, she compared how often children repeated new words. She also looked at how often they repeated information that was already known in a conversation. The study used 701 new words that were spoken to five children. Here are some examples of how the new words were introduced:

• "This is an + owl"
• "Here is a + whisk"

Three researchers analyzed the conversations from the five children. The children were recorded regularly, sometimes twice a week. To see if the children were learning the new words, the researchers noted every time a child repeated a new word, showed they understood, or moved on to a new topic.

The results showed that:

• 54% of the time, children repeated the new word in their next turn.
• 38% of the time, children said things that were related to the new word or topic.
• 9% of the time, children simply said 'yeah' to show they heard.

Even if children only said 'yeah' a small amount of the time, it still showed they could understand the new words. This is a step towards learning those new terms. When children moved on from a new word, they often continued talking about the same general idea. This suggests that even if they didn't repeat the word, they might have understood its meaning.

Clark's study showed that children repeated new words about twice as much as they repeated words from regular conversations. This supported her idea that repeating words helps children learn new ones. Children pay attention to new words. They often rely on adults introducing them with phrases like "this is" or "here is." Clark wanted to keep studying how children add new words to their vocabulary. So, she started looking at words children hear every day, like colors, but might not use much themselves.

How Do "Conventionality" and "Contrast" Help Language Learning?

Eve Clark also studies how two ideas, "conventionality" and "contrast," help us learn language.

• Conventionality means following a norm or standard. In language, it means everyone uses the same word to mean the same thing. For example, everyone agrees that "dog" means a furry pet. When you hear a language for the first time, you have to figure out what words mean.
• Contrast means learning a word by comparing it to other words. If you're at the zoo and learning about animals, you learn the difference between a tiger and a zebra. Both are striped, but they are different animals. The contrasting words help you figure out what an unknown word means. This idea also applies when children learn which tense of a verb to use, like knowing to say "told" instead of "telled."

Conventionality and contrast are very important for building language skills. But Clark also explains how learning language can help our brains develop too.

How Does Language Learning Help Our Brains Grow?

Eve Clark is well-known for showing how language acquisition (learning language) is connected to how our brains think (cognition). She believes that thinking and language work together. Children first use what they already know before they learn language. Then, they use language to build new categories in their minds.

Clark's ideas show that thinking and language interact in a cycle as children learn more. She says that words can be like invitations to create categories and understand different types of objects. Clark also thinks that language can help us make connections between ideas. This allows for more complex thoughts.

When learning language, Clark says children learn most from the adults around them. Babies first pick up on the most common nouns (names of things), verbs (action words), and adjectives (describing words). This suggests that as children, and as people, we use what we know from our brains' development. We also use what we learn from specific languages to categorize, identify, sort, and remember things.