“Crawl, Walk, Run” refers to the progression of physical development in children. We first must learn to crawl before we can walk and eventually run. It’s also widely used to describe any form of progression. Take playing chess as an example. You need to learn the game’s basic rules, like what each piece on the board can do before you can come up with strategies about how to close in on the King, and maybe over time learn enough to compete in a chess tournament.
This same “crawl, walk, run” principle applies to language acquisition according to linguist Eve V. Clark, who has been studying this for over 50 years. In a recent research article, she explains how we gradually learn language and use it to express ourselves, even before we grasp the full meaning.
Children need to “know just enough about the relevant word meaning” along with some common knowledge and context to determine what someone is saying. A child will already know words like dog (common knowledge) and when presented with a new word like dalmatian as a type of dog (context), they will most likely create a new term: “dalmatian dog.”
Clark also explains how this doesn’t stop at childhood – adults will speak and comprehend language for which they only have partial knowledge, relying on known terms to express meaning. As they learn more about a topic, called a domain, they can learn new words too.
Back to chess: if we’re first learning chess as an adult, we’d probably refer to the rook as a castle and the knight as a horse. It’s our way of expressing ourselves – and being understood – based on the terms we know. Pretty soon we will go from being a “woodpusher” to a grandmaster!
Read More:
CLARK EV. A gradualist view of word meaning in language acquisition and language use. Journal of Linguistics. 2023;59(4):737-762. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000330.