LEXICAL CREATIVITY IN FRENCH-SPEAKING CHILDREN

When children lack words for what they wish to talk about, they can st retch the words they have or they can coin new ones. The coinages chil dren produce reveal what they know at different stages about the struc ture of words and the meanings associated with affixes and with word-f ormation patterns. French-speaking children begin to coin words in the ir third year, but at first use only a handful of suffixes. By age 4;0 to 5;0, they produce a large range of different affixes (prefixes as well as suffixes) in their coinages, but they make virtually no use of compounding. Their coinages reveal that French-speaking children are sensitive to productive patterns in the formation of derived nouns, bu t they make certain consistent errors in their choices of verb-stems i n their word-formation.