Productivity and memory for newly formed words

ABSTRACT The first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the most productive suffix (- er ) well and its less productive companions (- ist and - ian ) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive - ly (about equal in frequency to - er ) together with - ist and - ian , did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including - er ) for the non-agentive - ly , with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.