Eve V. Clark facts for kids

Eve Vivienne Clark (born 26 July 1942) is a famous British-American linguist. A linguist is someone who studies language. Eve Clark's main work has been about how children learn their first language. She especially looks at how kids learn the meaning of words. She also studies how children and adults create new words, comparing English and Hebrew languages. Some of her research explores how children learn the right way to say things by listening to how adults respond when they make mistakes.

Eve Clark's Career

Eve Clark earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1969 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. After that, she worked on a special project about language at Stanford University. Later, she joined the Linguistics Department at Stanford University in the United States. She is now a retired professor from Stanford, but her work continues to be very important.

Awards and Special Recognitions

Eve Clark has received many awards and honors for her important work:

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

Understanding Language: How Kids Learn

Eve Clark's research mostly focused on how children learn their first language. She studied how they learn the meaning of words, how they form words, and how they use language every day. She did many studies by watching children and doing experiments. One of her most interesting findings is how important it is for children to talk with adults to help their language grow. She also looked at how children invent new words.

How Young Children Learn New Words

Eve Clark wanted to know how children remember new words they hear. She looked at many recordings of children talking (called "corpora" or collections of speech). She thought that children repeat new words to help them learn. She compared how often children repeated new words versus words they already knew.

Her study included 701 new words that five different children heard. For example, adults would say things like:

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

Three researchers studied the speech of five children: Abe, Naomi, Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The children were recorded regularly. To see if the children were learning the new words, the researchers noted every time a child repeated the new word, showed they understood it, or moved on to a new topic.

The results showed that children often repeated the new words. About 54% of the time, children repeated the word in their next turn. About 38% of the time, they talked about something related to the new word, showing they understood. And about 9% of the time, they just said "yeah" to show they heard it.

This study showed that children are aware of new words. They often repeat them, especially when adults introduce them with phrases like "this is" or "here is." Clark wanted to learn more about how children add new words to their vocabulary, so she started looking at how they learn color words.

Learning Colors and What They Mean

Eve Clark continued her research by focusing on how children learn about colors. She found that children sometimes have trouble learning the names for colors. Her research helped find ways to help children learn them better.

Clark found that joint attention is very important. This means when a child and an adult are both looking at the same thing and paying attention together. When they share attention, children can learn colors, and even the different shades of a color. Also, children learn color words best when they talk about them with adults. If a child tries to learn colors alone, it's harder because no one is there to tell them if they are right or wrong.

Clark explained that children first need to learn the main color, like "red" or "blue." After they understand the main color, they can start to learn about different tints and shades (like light blue or dark blue). This learning happens best when older people around them help them.

Eve Clark's research helps us understand not only how children learn words and their meanings, but also how they use those words in different situations.

How We Learn Language and Think

Eve Clark's work also shows how learning language helps us think better. She believes that thinking and language work together. Children first use what they already know before they learn language. Then, they use language to help them understand and organize new ideas.

Clark suggests that words are like invitations to create groups of things in our minds. For example, when a child learns the word "dog," they start to group all dogs together. She also thinks that language helps us make connections between different ideas, which makes our thinking more complex.

Clark says that children learn most from the adults in their lives. Babies often learn the most common nouns (names of things), verbs (action words), and adjectives (describing words) first. This means that as children, we use what we know from our experiences and from language to sort, identify, and remember things.