The use of nouns and verbs by Japanese children and their caregivers in book-reading and toy-playing contexts

Abstract

Japanese provides a valuable contrast for crosslinguistic studies of noun and verb dominance in early child language, and the effect of input on the early lexicon. In this study, 31 Japanese children between 1;0 and 2;0 and their caregivers were recorded in two contexts: joint bookreading and play with toys. Context had the largest effect, as nouns were much more frequent in the book context. Noun dominance was constant across development in the book context, but in the toy context there was a shift away as children developed from single words through the presyntactic stage to the syntactic stage. Caregiver language was verb dominant in a number of respects across development in the toy context, and thus was not closely related to child lexical balance. We conclude that in early lexical development, all children have a conceptual disposition to learn nouns. With vocabulary growth and the emergence of grammar, the proportion of verbs increases substantially, and at this stage properties of the input language may influence development.

Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children's usage and surrounding adult speech

“…Within child-directed speech, noun-to-verb ratios of both adults and children are known to be highly sensitive to the precise context in which the data is collected : Goldfield (1993) (analyzing twelve English mother-child dyads) found that during toy play, more noun types and tokens occurred than verb types or tokens, but during non-toy play (mothers playing with their children without toys present, physical play) more verb types and tokens were used. This contextual variation in child-directed speech is also shown by Tardif et al (1999) for English and Mandarin Chinese children and their caretakers in three different activity contexts, by Choi (2000) for Korean and English input in the contexts of toy play and book reading, and by Ogura et al (2006) for Japanese children and their caretakers in the contexts of book reading vs. toy play. This may reflect the kind of referential functions that noun phrases are associated with.…”

“…2 A series of studies has shown that book reading is a very special context, which induces an artificially heightened noun-to-verb ratio (Ogura, Dale, Yamashita, Murase & Mahieu, 2006 ;Tardif, Gelman & Xu, 1999), therefore we excluded these sessions. We also excluded from our analyses all utterances by children that were not genuine productions on their own but direct repetitions of a prompt by adults, as exemplified by the following : (7) ADULT : akka=ta ca-k-ku-_=mo 1SG=PTCL eat-3SG.P-NONPAST-1SG.A=REP lud-a= =na CLLDCh1R02S01.69 say-IMP=EMPH=PTCL ' Say '' I eat it. ''…”

Ocorrência de classes gramaticais na fala espontânea de crianças de 18 a 41 meses com pares

“…Pesquisas que empregam essa metodologia costumam registrar dados da interação entre adultos e crianças, em situação natural (e.g., Bastos et al, 2004;Scherer & Souza, 2011) e em contexto de elicitação, ou seja, em que o pesquisador provoca a interação com a criança por meio de perguntas ou pelo engajamento em brincadeira conjunta com ela (Befi -Lopes et al, 2007;Vidor, 2008). Nesses casos, é preciso considerar que diferentes contextos de interação criança-adulto podem favorecer a produção de substanti-vos ou de verbos, tanto por parte das crianças, quanto dos adultos, independente da língua falada pelos participantes (Choi, 2000;Goldfi eld, 1993;Ogura et al, 2006;Tardif et al, 1999). Há indícios, por exemplo, de que há situações em que, ao interagir com os adultos, as crianças podem produzir mais substantivos que verbos "sob demanda" (Tardif et al, 1999), ou seja, em função das falas dirigidas a elas pelo adulto (perguntas ou comentários, por exemplo), mais orientadas para a ação ou para a nomeação de objetos (Pessoa & Seidl de Moura, 2011).…”

Contextes de production et LAE en français : caractéristiques pragmatiques et syntaxiques

“…Ces caractéristiques de l'input évoquées dans la littérature (Bornstein et al, 2004 ;Ogura et al, 2006 ;Tardif et al, 1997) sont la fréquence des noms vs verbes, la transparence du système morphologique nominal vs. verbal, la position saillante des noms vs. verbes, la focalisation particulière des mères sur une catégorie grammaticale plutôt qu'une autre. Dans ce travail, seuls les deux derniers points sont considérés, à savoir la position des noms et des verbes dans les énoncés ainsi que l'orientation des énoncés des adultes vers la production chez les enfants d'une classe grammaticale particulière.…”

“…En effet, plusieurs recherches (Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Choi, 2000;Kim et al, 2000;Fernald & Morikawa, 1993;Ogura et al, 2006) observent que les énoncés du locuteur peuvent focaliser l'attention de l'interlocuteur sur une catégorie grammaticale plutôt qu'une autre. Deux principaux types d'énoncés sont définis dans cet ensemble de travaux : les énoncés orientés vers les objets et ceux orientés vers les activités.…”