Volume 15
Graduate Working Papers

Acquisition of English Interjections ouch, yuck, and oops in Early Childhood

Yoshiteru Asano
University of Colorado Boulder

Keywords

  • acquisition

How to Cite

Asano, Y. (1997). Acquisition of English Interjections ouch, yuck, and oops in Early Childhood. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 15. https://doi.org/10.25810/6t1p-7625

Abstract

Interjections in a language must be learned. This paper discusses acquisition of three English interjections ouch, yuck, and oops by children of as young as 1;7 and by adult caretakers (for comparison). The data analyzed here were taken from three previously-collected data sets which are available in the CHILDES database. The results imply that children may acquire those interjections early but they start using them at different ages due to phonological constraints, and indicate that uses of these interjections may be different between children and adults.