Cross‐Linguistic Analysis of Vocabulary in Young Children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and American English

Abstract

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

Can lexical errors inform about word class acquisition in FL?: evidence from greek learners of Spanish as a foreign language

“…This result can be explained by alluding to the process of the acquisition of nouns. As previous research has shown (Gentner, 1981;Kim, McGregor and Thompson, 2000;Bornstein et al 2004;Gentner and Baroditsky, 2009), nouns are the first word class to be acquired because they are more transparent in their meaning, since they are used to label concrete objects. Indeed, the results of our study confirm the early acquisition of the meaning of nouns given the fact that the most frequent lexical errors in nouns are related to their form.…”

“…Traditionally, there is the firm belief that all types of words are not equally easy to acquire. This belief has its origin in the observation of native language acquisition (Caselli et al, 1995;Bornstein et al, 2004;Gentner and Baroditsky, 2009), where children seem to acquire nouns first, then verbs, and finally adjectives and adverbs, respectively.…”

Cross-situational Learning of Foreign Vocabulary Reveals a Possible Noun Bias in Adulthood

“…This noun bias has been well-documented in naturalistic studies of children learning their first language (e.g., Bornstein et al, 2004;Gentner, 1982) and even two languages simultaneously (Levey & Cruz, 2003), yet very few language studies have turned an eye toward the possibility of a noun bias among adult language learners. Findings from two studies suggest there could be a noun bias among adults just as among young children.…”

“…Participants' average total foreign language proficiency was 8.49 (SD = 4.93). A number of participants reported various proficiencies in Spanish (26), French (9), Mandarin Chinese (6), Farsi (4), Hindi (4), Korean (4), Vietnamese (3), Polish (2), Italian (2), Polish (2), German (2), Urdu (2), and a number of other languages (reported once each: Canbrese, American Sign Language, Telegu, Amheric, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Tunisian Arabic, Arabic, Portuguese, and Nepali). Proficiency in any particular language was not analyzed as no special link was expected to exist between any of these and the target language, Hebrew.…”

“…Measuring name agreement was theory-motivated: the referential clarity hypothesis specifies that vocabulary learnability is largely a function of how clearly meanings are 1 These were measurements of isolate images, which were viewed only at test. 2 Values based on 6 coder average of participants' data. 3 Values based on a single coder of each participant's data.…”