Speech Innovations In Child Language: A Comparative Analysis Of English And Uzbek
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Published in Vol. 6 No. 2 (2026) of Asian Journal of Academic Research.
Asian Journal of Academic Research (AJAR) (ISSN: 2313-6596) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal dedicated to publishing high-quality, original research across a broad range of academic disciplines. The journal provides a global platform for researchers, academics, professionals, and policymakers to disseminate innovative findings, exchange knowledge, and promote interdisciplinary collaboration.
About the JournalAbstract
Young children do not only learn the words of their language; they also create new ones. Such speech innovations forms like English to broom ‘to sweep’ or Uzbek yeygich ‘a thing for eating, a spoon’ are absent from adult usage, yet they are built according to productive rules of the language. This article compares lexical and word-formation innovations in the speech of English and Uzbek-speaking preschool children. The study is qualitative and comparative-typological: English examples were drawn from published research on child lexical innovation, and Uzbek examples from observations of preschool children’s everyday speech. The innovations were classified according to the word-formation mechanism used and compared with the conventional adult forms. The results show that children in both languages coin words to fill gaps in their vocabulary and rely on the most transparent and productive patterns available. The preferred mechanisms, however, differ: English-speaking children rely heavily on conversion (zero derivation) and compounding, while Uzbek-speaking children predominantly use transparent derivational suffixes such as -chi, -gich, -la and -xona. The findings are interpreted in terms of Clark’s principles of contrast, conventionality and transparency and in terms of the typological difference between an analytic and an agglutinative language. Pedagogical implications for preschool education and speech therapy are discussed.
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