Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:16:21.956Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Do early noun and verb production predict later verb and noun production? Theoretical implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI ,
PIETRO SPATARO ,
DIANE L. PUTNICK  and
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
EMIDDIA LONGOBARDI*
Affiliation:
Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
PIETRO SPATARO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Italy
DIANE L. PUTNICK
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
Affiliation:
Child and Family Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
*
[*] Address for correspondence: Emiddia Longobardi, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome (Italy), Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 (Rome). tel: +39 06 49917908; fax: +39 06 49917910; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many studies have addressed the question of the relative dominance of nouns over verbs in the productive vocabularies of children in the second year of life. Surprisingly, cross-class (noun-to-verb and verb-to-noun) relations between these two lexical categories have seldom been investigated. The present longitudinal study employed observational and parent-report data obtained from thirty mother–child dyads at 1;4, 1;8, and 2;0 to examine this issue. Both the Natural Partitions/Relational Relativity (NP/RR) hypothesis and the Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM) predict that having an initial repertoire of common nouns should facilitate the acquisition of novel verbs, whereas only the ECM suggests that children exploit the syntactic and semantic constraints of known verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns. In line with the ECM, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the percentages of nouns produced by children at 1;4 predicted later verbs at 1;8, whereas the percentages of verbs produced at 1;8 predicted later nouns at 2;0.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 480 - 495
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arunachalam, S. & Waxman, S. R. (2011). Grammatical form and semantic context in verb learning. Language Learning and Development 7, 169–84.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J. S., Reilly, J. & Hartung, J. (1994). Developmental and stylistic variation in the composition of early vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 21, 85–123.Google Scholar
Bornstein, M. H., Cote, L. R., Maital, S., Painter, K., Sung-Yun, P., Pascual, L., Pêcheux, M.-G., Ruel, J., Venuti, P. & Vyt, A. (2004). Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean and American English. Child Development 75, 1115–39.Google Scholar
Bornstein, M. H., Hahn, C. S., Putnick, D. L. & Suwalsky, J. T. (2014). Stability of core language skill from early childhood to adolescence: a latent variable approach. Child Development 85, 1346–56.Google Scholar
Bornstein, M. H. & Putnick, D. L. (2012). Stability of language in childhood: a multiage, multidomain, multimeasure, and multisource study. Developmental Psychology 48, 477–91.Google Scholar
Camaioni, L. & Longobardi, E. (1995). Nature and stability of individual differences in early lexical development of Italian-speaking children. First Language 15, 203–18.Google Scholar
Camaioni, L. & Longobardi, E. (2001). Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech. Journal of Child Language 28, 773–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caselli, M. C., Bates, E., Casadio, P., Fenson, J., Fenson, L., Sanderl, L. & Weir, J. (1995). A cross-linguistic study of early lexical development. Cognitive Development 10, 159–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, M. C. & Casadio, P. (1995). Il primo vocabolario del bambino [The first vocabulary of the child] . Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Choi, S. & Gopnik, A. (1995). Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language 22, 497–529.Google Scholar
D'Odorico, L., Carubbi, S., Salerni, N. & Calvo, V. (2001). Vocabulary development in Italian children: a longitudinal evaluation of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Journal of Child Language 28, 351–72.Google Scholar
D'Odorico, L. & Fasolo, M. (2007). Nouns and verbs in the vocabulary acquisition of Italian children. Journal of Child Language 34, 891–907.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S. (1991). The validity of a parent report measure of vocabulary and syntax at 24 months. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 34, 565–71.Google Scholar
Dale, P. S., Bates, E., Reznick, J. S. & Morisset, C. (1989). The validity of a parent report instrument of child language at twenty months. Journal of Child Language 16, 239–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Diedenhofen, B. & Musch, J. (2015). Cocor: a comprehensive solution for the statistical comparison of correlations. Plos One 10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Bates, E., Thal, D. J. & Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 59, 1–173.Google Scholar
Ferguson, B., Graf, E. & Waxman, S. R. (2014). Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds. Cognition 131, 139–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S. & Gleitman, L. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua 92, 333–75.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. A. (ed.), Language development: Vol. 2. Language, thought, and culture (pp. 301–34). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. (2006). Why verbs are hard to learn. In Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (eds), Action meets word: how children learn verbs (pp. 544–64). New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relational relativity and early word learning. In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. (eds), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 215–56). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. & Boroditsky, L. (2009). Early acquisition of nouns and verbs: evidence from Navajo. In Mueller Gathercole, V. C. (ed.), Routes to language: studies in honor of Melissa Bowerman (pp. 5–36). Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 3–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A. & Trueswell, J. (2005). Hard words. Language Learning and Development 1, 23–64.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M. & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2008). How toddlers begin to learn verbs. Trends in Cognitive Science 12, 397–403.Google Scholar
Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S. & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language 35, 515–31.Google Scholar
Goodman, J. C., McDonough, L. & Brown, N. B. (1998). The role of semantic context and memory in the acquisition of novel nouns. Child Development 69, 1330–44.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. & Naigles, L. (2002). How children use input to acquire a lexicon. Child Development 73, 418–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M. & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology 27, 236–48.Google Scholar
Kim, M., McGregor, K. K. & Thompson, C. K. (2000). Early lexical development in English-and Korean-speaking children: language-general and language-specific patterns. Journal of Child Language 27, 225–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lieven, E. M. V., Pine, J. M. & Barnes, H. (1992). Individual differences in early vocabulary development: redefining the referential–expressive distinction. Journal of Child Language 19, 287–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Longobardi, E., Rossi-Arnaud, C., Spataro, P., Putnick, D. L. & Bornstein, M. H. (2015). Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language. Journal of Child Language 42, 95–121.Google Scholar
Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Putnick, D. L. & Bornstein, M. H. (2015). Noun and verb production in maternal and child language: continuity, stability, and prediction across the second year of life. Language Learning and Development. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2015.1048339.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A. & Bates, E. (1994). Continuity in lexical and morphological development: a test of the critical mass hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 21, 339–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDonough, C., Song, L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. & Lannon, R. (2011). An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning. Developmental Science 14, 181–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naigles, L. R. & Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1998). Why are some verbs learned before other verbs? Effects of input frequency and structure on children's early verb use. Journal of Child Language 25, 95–120.Google Scholar
Papaeliou, C. & Rescorla, L. (2011). Vocabulary development in Greek children: a cross-linguistic comparison using the Language Development Survey. Journal of Child Language 38, 861–87.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A., Cassidy, K. & Gleitman, L. (2007). When we think about thinking: the acquisition of belief verbs. Cognition 105, 125–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rescorla, L., Frigerio, A., Sali, M., Spataro, P. & Longobardi, E. (2014). Typical and delayed lexical development in Italian. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 57, 1792–803.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rescorla, L., Lee, Y. C., Oh, K. J. & Kim, Y. A. (2013). Lexical development in Korean: vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 56, 735–47.Google Scholar
Snedeker, J. & Gleitman, L. R. (2004). Why it is hard to label our concepts. In Hall, D. & Waxman, S. R. (eds), Weaving a lexicon, 257–93. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Stevens, J. P. (2002). Applied multivariate statistics for the social sciences, 4th ed. Mahwah, NJ: LEA.Google Scholar
Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: evidence from Mandarin speaker's early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology 32, 492–504.Google Scholar
Tardif, T., Gelman, S. A. & Xu, F. (1999). Putting the ‘noun bias’ in context: a comparison of English and Mandarin. Child Development 70, 620–35.Google Scholar
Tardif, T., Shatz, M. & Naigles, L. R. (1997). Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: a comparison of English, Italian, and Mandarin. Journal of Child Language 24, 535–65.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R., Fu, X., Arunachalam, S., Leddon, E., Geraghty, K. & Song, H. (2013). Are nouns learned before verbs? Infants provide insight into a long-standing debate. Child Development Perspectives 7, 155–9.Google Scholar
Waxman, S. R. & Lidz, J. L. (2006). Early word learning. In Kuhn, D., Siegler, R. S., Damon, W. & Lerner, R. M. (eds), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language, 6th ed. (pp. 299–335). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar