Childish Creativity

Created By: Weny Fitriana

(1503046060)
 Childish Creativity
A childs linguistic environment determines its
mother tongue.
 Child are prone to come up with all kinds of
words and expressions which they have never
heard before because adults never use them.
Eg.
Daughter: Somebodys at the door.
Mother: Theres nobody at the door
Daughter: Theres yes body at the door.
 Childrens attempts to construct, or
reconstruct, their mother tongue is a type of
cognitive processing or tuning which usually
shows that the child has developed to a
slightly more advanced linguistic stage of
language development.
 Eg.
Yesterday, we went to grandmas

It could be said that the error is not within the

child but the language itself as it fails to
adhere to the symmetry of its own
grammatical patterning.
 Creative construction process- another
example of how the relative autonomy of the
childs developing linguistic system is related
to the adult version of the language.
Children = well-programmed computers.
(creative but make inaccurate guesses about
rules and patterns they are acquiring).
 Example :

Pattern A : Theres Carlos! (Theres/Heres +Noun)

Pattern B : There He is! (There/Here Pronoun + is)
Pattern C : *There Carlos is! (There/Here + Noun +is)
 Childrens creative construction reflects their inborn
sensitivity to syntactic structures of the language
they are acquiring.
Example I
A.K. : Bens hicking up. Hes hicking up.
Adult : what?
A.K. : Hes got the hiccups.
Example II
Father : Dont interrupt.
Child : Daddy, youre interring up!

There is nothing wrong with the heating of these

two children.
 The childs error are not mistakes of the ear or slips
of the eye but in fact, evidence of how creative
children can be in constructing their grammars based
on what they have learned and on what they can
plausibly assume.
Children are not only active and creative participants
in acquiring their mother tongues; even their errors
reveal that they are incredibly sensitive to the small
and usually unobvious but inherent grammatical
characteristics of the language they learn.