Early lexical development in English- and Korean-speaking children: language-general and language-specific patterns

Abstract

The present study examined the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean-learning children (from a mean age of 1;6 to 1;9) and for the English-learning children (from a mean age of 1;4 to 1;8). Results showed that both Korean- learning and English-learning children acquired significantly more nouns than verbs at the 50-word mark. However, Korean children learned significantly more verbs than did English-learning children. The relative ease with which Korean learners, as compared to English learners, acquired verbs parallels several differences in the linguistic and socio-pragmatic characteristics of the input addressed to them. Korean- speaking caregivers presented more activity-oriented utterances, more verbs, and more salient cues to verbs than did English-speaking caregivers. These data suggest that both general and language-specific factors shape the early lexicon.

Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children

“…As Gentner points out, the relevant question is not whether every child knows more nouns than verbs, but rather whether children systematically learn more nouns than we would expect given their frequency in the input (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001). If the noun bias is characterized in this way, the current evidence suggests that it is a cross-linguistically robust feature of development (see e.g., Kim, McGregor & Thompson, 2000;Tardif, Gelman & Xu, 1999;Bornstein et al, 2004). Second, it is possible for shifts which are specific to particular languages to be caused by universal developmental changes.…”

Neighborhood density effects in spoken word recognition in Spanish

“…Compare the different segmentation strategies that might be employed in stress-timed languages like English (Cutler, & Norris, 1988) versus syllable-timed languages like French (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981). Cross-linguistic differences may also account for some differences observed in vocabulary acquisition (Kim, McGregor, & Thompson, 2000). As a result of such differences among languages, language disorders may present themselves in a different way in other languages.…”

A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context

“…More verb learning failures. Though English-speaking children have an early noun bias, many claim that children speaking other languages have a verb bias (Choi, 2000;Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Choi & Bowerman, 1991;Sandhofer et al, 2000;Tardif, 1996;Tardif et al, 1999;Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1997; yet see Kim, McGregor, & Thompson, 2000 for conflicting results). Perhaps the difficulty children have in learning verbs is not about the mapping of words to relations, but rather a problem specific with word mapping in English.…”