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[Lise Menn]

I know of within-language blends for words that the child may have
considered to have the same referent: in Menn 1971 (Lingua  26:225-241)
there's a probable blend of 'snap' and 'button', and in Waterson somewhere
(try the collected papers, Waterson, Natalie. 1987. Prosodic Phonology:
The Theory and its Application to Language Acquisition and Speech
Processing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Grevatt and Grevatt.) there's a blend of
'hymn' and 'angel' referring to a hymn book with an angel pictured on the
cover.  Seems to me I've recently heard of other examples...
but the bilingual blends you describe certainly make sense in this
context. Looks like a nice phenomenon to try to capture by connectionist
modeling!
	Lise Menn


On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Rochelle Newman wrote:

> 	I was talking to a parent today who was raising her child
> bilingually, between German & English.  She was commenting that the child
> (now just over 2) was creating blends (that is, combining words from the
> two languages).  So, the child's word for blanket was bekke, from blanket +
> dekke, and the child's word for brush was brushke or brushte (I'm not sure
> I heard the stop consonant correctly, and not knowing German I wasn't sure
> what follow-up questions to ask).   I hadn't heard of children combining
> words in this manner before, and was wondering whether others had heard of
> this.
>
>
>
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> Rochelle Newman              rochelle-newman at uiowa.edu
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