Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children

Abstract

To understand the nature of lexical development, it is crucial to investigate how children learn a wide range of word classes, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, along with closed class words such as prepositions and classifiers. An important question is whether a particular type of concept, over others, universally invites children to name it at early stages of word learning to serve as the entry point into language, that is, whether there is, in Gentner's words, "an initial set of fixed hooks with which children can bootstrap themselves into a position to learn the less transparent aspects of language" (Gentner, 1982). A number of researchers have proposed that basic-level object nouns serve such a function and argue that the basic-level object categories reflect the natural clustering of the world and are hence conceptually privileged (e.g., Gentner, 1982; Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001; Rosch, 1978). On the other hand, some researchers disagree with this view, arguing that the relative dominance of a particular type of words in the early lexicon is determined by distributional and structural properties of children's native language, and hence that the class of words that children learn earliest should differ across different languages (e.g., Choi & Gopnik, 1995; Tardif, 1996). In this chapter we address this issue, reporting results from a series of crosslinguistic studies that examined how English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-speaking children generalize newly learned nouns and verbs. Based on the results, we evaluate the two competing positions in the noun-verb debate. We then explore 450 Q1

Action Speaks Louder Than Words: Young Children Differentially Weight Perceptual, Social, and Linguistic Cues to Learn Verbs

“…Because of the advanced age of these participants, pointing replaced visual fixation as the dependent measure. This substitution has been made in prior research with 3-year-olds, generating results comparable to looking time data (Imai et al, 2006;Maguire, Pruden, Hirsh-Pasek, Hansel, & Meyer, 2004). Prior to beginning the video, the experimenter explained to children that they would be playing a pointing game.…”

“…Research is accumulating to suggest that linguistic information can alter preliminary perceptual preferences (e.g., Behrend, Harris, & Cartwright, 1995;Echols & Marti, 2004;Fisher, 2002;Imai et al, 2006;Maguire, 2004;Naigles & Kako, 1993). For example, Naigles and Kako (1993) demonstrated that before the age of 30 months, children can use syntactic information, particularly that encoded in the transitive verb frame, to redirect or refocus their attention on a less favored action (e.g., a causative action), thereby leading to a successful mapping.…”

“…Verbs are hard to learn, even for older children (Forbes & Farrar, 1995), and even in languages such as Japanese where verbs can appear in isolation and in salient sentence-final position (Bornstein et al, 2004;Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2002;Imai et al, 2006). However, despite the difficulty in learning verbs, words for actions or events appear among children's earliest receptive and production vocabularies (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988;Bloom, 1993;Bloom, Tinker, & Margulis, 1993;Bowerman, 1974;Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986;Hampson, 1989;Huttenlocher, Smiley, & Charney, 1983;Lieven, Pine, & Barnes, 1992;McCune-Nicolich, 1981;Nelson, 1973;Nelson, Hampson, & Shaw, 1993;Pine, 1992;Tomasello, 1992;Tomasello & Todd, 1983).…”

Investigating Word Class Effects in First and Second Languages

“…Moreover, further evidence was provided for the significance of the noun, and its universal predominance has been shown in a multitude of studies (e.g., Gentner, 2006;Imai, Haryu, Okada, Li, & Shigematsu, 2006). Generally, researchers have focused on nouns and verbs, but barely or not at all on adjectives and closed-class words (Dürr & Schoblinski, 2006).…”

Why Nouns Trump Verbs in Word Learning: New Evidence from Children and Adults in the Human Simulation Paradigm

“…It is also not the case that the noun advantage occurs only in 'noun-friendly' languages that possess linguistic properties (e.g., word order, word frequency, stress patterns) that might make nouns more salient than other forms (Gentner, 1982). A noun advantage in early vocabularies has been reported in 'verb-friendly' languages as well, including Korean (Au, Dapretto, & Song, 1994), Japanese (Ogura, 2001, as cited in Imai et al, 2006), Italian (Caselli et al, 1995), and Navajo (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001). Although there is some debate concerning the cross-linguistic evidence for the noun advantage (e.g., Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999), the controversy appears to reflect methodological issues: Research based on parental reports of their infants' vocabularies consistently reports a noun advantage, while research based on infants' spontaneous language production in interactive play sessions sometimes does not (Lavin, Hall, & Waxman, 2006).…”