Is noun bias universal? Evidence from Chinese and Korean compared with French and English

Yee, Shannon

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/109008 Copy

Description

Title

Is noun bias universal? Evidence from Chinese and Korean compared with French and English

Author(s)

Yee, Shannon

Issue Date

2020

Keyword(s)

• linguistics
• noun bias
• vocabulary acquisition
• child language acquisition

Abstract

Looking at the nature of nouns and verbs along with support for innate constraints, there should be the same clear and universal predominance among all children for learning nouns over verbs in early lexical development. On the other hand, a variety of cultural and language- dependent factors, such as morphology, saliency, frequency in the input and pragmatics could impact the acquisition of nouns in comparison to verbs. I compared the vocabulary acquisition of English-speaking and French- speaking (“European”) children to that of Mandarin-speaking and Korean-speaking (“Asian”) children at the ages of 16-months, 19- months and 22-months using the online children’s vocabulary learning database Wordbank and found that the evidence for a universal noun- category bias is lacking, likely due to the linguistic and cultural features of the groups considered.

Publisher

Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109008

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