Eve V. Clark

Eve Vivienne Clark (born July 26, 1942), a British-born American linguist, is known for research on how children acquire the meanings of words. She examined how children register words they have not heard before by studying conversational patterns, finding that children repeat new words roughly twice as often as ordinary information, and she explored how children learn color terminology, arguing that joint attention between child and adult is essential to mastering color labels and their variations. Her research on word formation drew on comparative studies of English and Hebrew, examining how children and adults create and use new words, and she studied how children learn conventional ways of expressing meaning through adult feedback on their language errors, showing that language acquisition is bound up with cognitive development as children build categories and meanings through interaction with adults.