Making sense of compound nouns: A study of word relatedness in Telugu

Abstract

Lexical development is typically viewed as elaboration, differentiation, and integration of semantic codes - codes that signify the meanings embodied in the words. Our earlier work based on 50 noun + noun (NN) compounds in Telugu has shown that children in the age group 8-14 years exhibit clear-cut developmental trends in producing and segmenting the NN compound nouns and generating words that are related in meaning to the target compounds. The database for the present study is drawn from our earlier work, and it consists of 1800 words reported to be related in meaning to the 50 target compound nouns by 36 children (12 III grade children, 12 VI grade children, and 12 IX grade children) and 600 words produced by 12 adults. A thorough analysis of the individual word associations generated by the subjects revealed that children tended to generate: (I) compounds with the same head word as the target word but with a new modifier word, (2) novel compounds that have phonetic/phonological association with the target words, most of which are actually nonwords in the language; and (3) new single-stem nouns and new compounds that are considerably fewer in number than those produced by adult subjects. Some of the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the differences in performance of children vs. adult subjects in the encoding of word meanings in an experimental context are discussed in this paper. © 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation.