Eve Clark
Eve V. Clark is the Richard W. Lyman Professor of Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University, Stanford. California. She studied French Language and Literature, then did her PhD (Linguistics, Edinburgh) on language acquisition before moving to Stanford.
Eve’s research has focussed on children’s acquisition of meaning, beginning with her Semantic Features Hypothesis, and now framed by the pragmatic principles of Conventionality and Contrast. She has worked on the acquisition of lexical meaning for both relational and non-relational terms; on word-formation and lexical innovations, cross-linguistically; on children’s uptake of ‘new’ words in the course of conversation, and on how adults license inferences about the meanings of new words. She has also worked on the role of joint attention in new word acquisition, and on the kinds of information adults provide to children about the referents of new words. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and The Spencer Foundation in the US, and through her collaborators, by the Israel-US Binational Science Foundation and the Agence National de Recherche. Her observational and experimental studies have appeared in numerous journal articles and chapters, and in two monographs: The Ontogenesis of Meaning (1979) and The Lexicon in Acquisition (1993). She is also known for her general text and reference book on acquisition, First Language Acquisition (2nd edn, 2009).
She is currently working on adult reformulations in interactions with young children, and how these provide feedback on errors, feedback that is also relevant to children’s uptake of corrected forms; on the acquisition of verb paradigms in French where widespread homophony presents a particular challenge to discovery of the contrasting meanings involved, on the role of gesture in combination with speech in adult-child interactions, and on language-as-expertise.