NEOLOGISMS IN CHILDREN’S SPEECH

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents a case study – speech "errors", neologisms were recorded during the longitudinal monitoring of a child's speech, i.e. regular speech and language development from the third to the sixth year of life. The previously published work using the material collected during the same longitudinal monitoring analyzed "errors" in the morphological forms of verbs, adjectives, and pronouns, while this paper explores the forms of nouns and word formation. A participatory observation method and a comparative descriptive method were used to gather data. The neologisms from this research confirm what has been emphasized in previous research: searching for appropriate grammatical forms and words a child makes "errors" that in fact verify that children derive the native language grammar rules from the language patterns, i.e. speech they are exposed to. A child will learn standard language forms over time, so "errors" should not be always corrected and drawn attention to as "irregular" forms, but a parent (educator) should offer correct forms to the child not criticizing him/her, and when it comes to innovative semantemes (lexical and grammatical units), they should be used as an incentive for creativity in language, for thinking about language and its creative possibilities.