Emergence of early nouns and verbs in English and Mandarin : a longitudinal analysis of caregivers' speech and gestures.

Abstract

Young, monolingual English-learners have been reported to have mostly nouns in their early vocabularies (Fenson et al., 2007), whereas young, monolingual Mandarin-learners have been reported to have a mixture of both nouns and verbs (Tardif, Fletcher, Liang, and Zhang, 2002). Moreover, this cross-linguistic difference is greatest at the earliest stages of their vocabulary acquisition (Tardif, under review), lending further support for the importance of caregiver input in children's early language development. Prior research has focused on caregivers' linguistic input frequencies and the perceptual saliency of words being learnt to account for these differences. However, caregivers' extralinguistic cues, which direct attention in combination with speech, have received much less attention.