Linguistic Analysis of a Rare Type of Children’s Neologism: ‎A Qualitative Case Study

Despite the importance of neologism during the children's language development as their first attempt to apply the “creative” feature of the language, it has been so far neglected in researches. The aim of the present study is to investigate an infrequent kind of neologism in children, emphasizing the nature of language-related arousal. The method was descriptive-analytic, and the data were collected assisted by mothers, from the spontaneous speech of 8 children from the age of 20 months to 4 years old, during more than one year survey. Finding shows that not only arousal may effectuate the production of iconic non-words and onomatopoeia, but the phonotactic rules of the mother language in the child's non-words can also be violated under the influence of linguistic arousal. Furthermore, from the cognitive viewpoint, the more complicated concepts shape the more complicated phonological forms. Since this type of neologism has an entirely innovative morphology of coinage, they lack root and derivational morphemes, however sometimes children use them as the base of a compound verb.