first language acquisition, compounding and derivation, acquisition of morphological processes, lexical innovation, psycholinguistics

Having not acquired or retrieved any words for the intended concept, in the process of mother tongue acquisition, children sometimes try to innovate new words in dealing with the problem. This study empirically investigates these innovations in preschool years. The data include 60 words innovated by a female native speaker of Persian (2.6 trough 5.0). The result shows that she made use of 7 morphological processes to coin the words and regarding these innovations, adjective and compounding are the most frequent grammatical categories and morphological processes respectively. But the first morphological process used by the child is derivation through suffix "-i", the most productive Persian suffix. This result does not support Clark's findings since she says that the most productive process is the first one which children use to make their own new words. psycholinguistics